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VALUABLE DOCUMENTS, 



BEING 



SIRNEY S VINDICATION OP ABOLITIONISTS PROTEST OF 

, THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY TO THE PEOPLE OF 

/ THE UNITED STATES, OR, TO SUCH AMERICANS 

AS VALUE THEIR RIGHTS LETTER FROM THE 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE N. Y, 
A. S. SOCIETY, TO THE EXEC. COM. 
OF THE OHIO STATE A. S. S. 
AT CINCINNATI— OUT- 
RAGE UPON SOUTH- 
ERN RIGHTS. 



BOSTON : 

FUBLISHED BY ISAAC KNAPF, 

46, WASHINGTON STliEET, 



1836 



[The compiler of the following pieccK desirinjr, from their excellency, to 
ensure to them an extensive circulation, and an easy reference, has thrown 
thera into a pamphlet form. He forbears any further reeommendatiou, 
desiring only to secure for thern a careful perusal.] 



C O N T E N 'i b , 



I. J. G. Birney's Third Letter— Vindication of Abolitioij- 

ists. 

II. Protest of the American Anti-Slavery Society. 

III. To the People of the United States, or, to such Ameri- 
cans as value their Rights. 

IV. A Lettf^r from the Executive Committee of the Nerr 
York Anti-Slavery Society, to the Executive Committe® 
of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society at Cincinnati. 

V. Outrage upon Southern Rights. 



J. G. BIRNEY'S LETTER— VINDICATION OF 
ABOLITIONISTS. 

PUBLIC MEETING IN ALABAMA. 

At a large and respectable meeting of tlie citizens of 
Athens and Limestone county, according to previous no- 
tice, at the Court House on Tuesday, the ISth inst., on 
motion, Capt. Wm. Mason was called to the chair, and 
Francis H. Ford appointed Secretary, The object of the 
meeting was explained by Col. John W. Lane, at some 
length. On motion of Col. Lane, that a committee be 
appointed to draft a preamble and resolutions expressive of 
the views of the meeting, tlie following gentlemen were 
appointed : — Col. John \V. Lane, Rev. Jeremiah Tucker, 
G. S. Houston, Esq., Mr. Ira E. Hobbs, Mr. Gabriel Smith, 
Mr. James Craig, Mr. Wm. T. Gamble, and David M. 
Crawford, Esq. The committee after retiring a short 
time, reported the following preamble and resolutions, 
which were unanimously adopted : 

Whereas, from the recent expulsion of blacklegs and 
gamblers from the adjoining states, and those v.'ho have no 
visible means, and follow no employment for support, but 
live upon the labor of others, filching from the thoughtless 
and unwary their hard earned savings, by acts that in their 
moral effects are no better than robbery; 

And, whereas, from recent developemenfs of an organiz- 
ed band of abolition fanatics of the Northern states, head- 
ed in part by Garrison, Tappmi, Cox, Thompson, May, 
and James G. Birney, of Kentucky, with others, whose 
1* 



b PUBLIC MEETING 

sole and avowed object is to sow the seed of discord, rapine, 
and murder among the slaves of the South. The boasted 
accession to the recently organized societies at the North. 
Tlieir increased zeal, their accumulating means, and mul- 
tiplying presses, teeming with the most slanderous and 
rancorous abuse of the slaveholding population of the 
South, thus encouraging insubordination and insurrection 
among our domestic circle, are acts looked upon with the 
greatest indignation by the community. What then re- 
mains for us? Shall we fold our arms and be still until 
the storm sweeps over us, and the earth shakes beneath 
us? No. We will declare to the world that we will de- 
fend our liberties, and our property, which the Constitu- 
tion of our country has guaranteed to us; but having 
riofhts, and knowincr them, we shall dare inaintain them. 

Therefore, Resolved, That a Committee of Vigilance, 
to consist of twenty, be appointed, a majority of whom 
shall have power to act, whose duty it shall be to take such 
measures and use such means as they may deem proper, 
in bringing to public view, and whipping all blacklegs, 
gamhlers, or other idle suspicious persons, who may locate 
or loiter about our town or county, without any visible 
means of support. 

Resolved, That said committee use all energetic means 
in ferreting out and detecting any person or persons that 
may attempt to circulate among the community, any 
pamphlet, tract, or any seditious publication of any kind 
whatever; or tampering with slaves, with a view to excite 
insurrection; and upon proof of such fact, to inflict upon 
such person or persons (hath, which is the penalty of our 
statute for such offences, or such other {)unishnient as they 
mav think proper. 

Resolved, 'I'hat we recommend to the citizens of each 
Captain's beat in the county, to appoint a Committee of Vig- 
ilance, wliose duty it shall be to apprehend all suspicious 
persons who may be found in their respective neiL^hhor- 
hoods, and brinir them before the fifeneral Commiltee of 
Vi'Jilance, at Athens, for examination. 



ixN ATHENS, ALABAMA. 7 

Resolved, That we pledge the community our live?*, our 
fortunes, and our sacred honors, to sustain the course 
which may be pursued by the Committee of Vigilance, in 
pledge of which we subscribe our proper names. 

Resolved, That the Secretary be requested to keep the 
resolutions open four weeks, to afford an opportunity for 
all to sign their names who desire so to do. 

Resolved, That said committee shall have power to fill 
all vacancies which may accrue therein. 

In virtue of the first resolution, the following gentlemen 
were appointed the Committee of Vigilance, to wit : 

William T. Gamblk, Silas Hine, 

Jamks Craig, John Maples, 

James M. Coman, Alexander Word, 

Samuel Tanner, Ira E. Hobbs, 

Gabriel Smith, John R. Evans, 

George M alone, Geo. S. Houston, 

Jeremiah Tucker, Daniel Coleman, 

David M. Crawford, John W. Lank, 

Bartley Cox, William Mason, 

Francis H. Ford, Luke Matthews. 

Resolved, That the proceedings of this meeting be 
signed by the Chairman and countersigned by the Sec- 
retary, and published in the Alabama Watchman. 

WILLIAM MASON, Chairman. 
FRANCIS H. FORD, Secretary. 

[Note. — We are informed, that besides the Rev. Jere- 
miah Tucker, named above, a Baptist minister, six other 
members of the Vigilance Committee named, are profess- 
ed members of the Christian family, viz : W. T. Gamble, 
Presbyterian, S. Tanner and J. R. Evans, Baptist, and B. 
Cox, S. Hine, D. Coleman, and W. Mason, Methodists. — 
Ed. N. Y. Evangdist.] 



MR. BIRNEY S LETTER. 

MR. BIRNEY'S ANSWER. 

Cincinnati, Dec. 9, 1835. 

Gentlemen, — A number of the Alabama Watchman, 
containing the foregoing account of the proceedings of a 
* public meeting,' lately held in Athens, has reached me, 
enveloped as newspapers usually are, when sent by mail. 
An extra of that journal, containing a duplicate account 
of the same proceedings, carefully enclosed in a blank 
wrapper, sealed, and charged with a double rate of post- 
ao-e, [unpaid,) has also been sent to me and received. All 
this care, to convey speedy and authentic information of 
the notice you have been pleased to take of one who had 
little reason to expect such conspicuity as you have given 
him, it is to be presumed, has been exercised by your agen- 
cy and direction. In this reply, which, after no hurried 
reflection,! have thought proper to make to your proceed- 
ings, I shall take up but little time in noticing what was 
done that is strictly personal to myself. I will stop only 
long enough to remind you — especially that portion of you 
who profess to be follou'ers of Christ — of the unjust im- 
pression you have attempted to make on those to whom I 
am a stranger, by associating me, in your proceedings, 
with ' gam.hlcrs, blacklegs, and suspicious persons,' It is 
well known to you all, that, with laborious diligence, I 
prosecuted in your county, and with no mean success, a 
profession, arduous in its duties, and, to a conscientious 
raind, beset with difficulties and temptations. To the 
generousness of my practice, the bar will testify, and, 
with parties and ivitnesses, bear record of my exemption 
from the petty tricks and advantages which bring the pro- 
fession into disrepute. Knowing me, by an acquaintance 
©f many years, as you did, — in my profession — as a mem- 



MR. BIRNEY S LETTER. 9 

ber of the church — as a citizen — you have tried to pro- 
duce an impression, that you hicio to be unjust and inju- 
rious. As Christians and as gentlemen, — now that you 
have had time for reflection, — you should be sorry for it, 
and ashamed of it. 

I will not, by pleading your example, although it may 
be a full moiety of your number are, by profession, Chris- 
tians, seek to justify the use of violent and denunciatory 
language. In you, ih^frst use of such language is suffi- 
ciently unbecoming. For me to use it, after having wit- 
nessed, in this instance, its ugliness, would be wholly 
inexcusable. Banishing, then, every thing like ill will or 
resentment, I would reply to you ' more in sorrow than in 
anger.' I cannot but remember that there are among you 
those with whom I have passed many and pleasant years 
of professional intercourse — with whom I have had no 
other strife than intellectual and professional, and this so 
honorable, so courteous, and so kind, as in no degree to 
hinder our taking sweet counsel, and sitting often togeth- 
er in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. 1 am led to believe 
that the present is an occasion providentially offered for 
the promotion of some good end. As such, I will attempt 
to use it, for your benefit, for my own, and for that of our 
common country, to which my love is no less than yours. 

No way presents itself in which I can more success- 
fully accomplish a service of this kind, than by correcting 
some of the material errors into which you and other ad- 
vocates of slavery have fallen, in relation to the charac- 
ter, object, means, &:,c., of those who are known by the 
name of abolitionists. If, now, you are at length eman- 
cipated from the dominion of those inflamed passions, by 
which it is evident, during your proceedings, you were 
held captive, and prepared to bring to the consideration of 
what I shall in truth and sincerity tell you, the calm and 
enlightened judgment, which I know was possessed in 



10 MR. BIRNEY's letter. 

former times by some of your committee, you will feei oet- 
ter, safer, happier, in the conviction that, so far from that 
portion of your brethren and fellow-citizens whom you 
have charged with trying to bring upon you the sudden 
consummation of the calamities to which they see you ex- 
posed, and which of themselves, if let alone, now for a 
long time linger not, their first wish is to avert them, to 
save you from their destruction, and make our united coun- 
try in reality what poetry has feigned her to be,— 

* The land of the free and tlie home of the brave ! ' 

1. The character of the aholitionists. — Although there 
are among them a considerable number of high-minded, 
just, and intelligent men, who are connected with no relig- 
ious sect, yet the great majority are Christians by profes- 
sion, and are found among the most active, zealous, and 
well-informed classes of the several churches to which they 
respectively belong. In England, they would fall under the 
contemptuous designation of * Methodists,' the name by 
which the working men of all the churches there, both es- 
tablished and dissenting, are called, when spoken of by 
the irreligious part of the community, or by their more in- 
dolent and fashionable brethren. It is not meant that all 
belonging to the most zealous, active, and well-informed 
classes in their respective churches in this country, are 
abolitionists. By no means. Yet it is chiefly by drawing upon 
them, that the abolitionists have increased their numbers, 
from the mere handful of two years ago, to it may be 40,- 
000, as stated in a meeting of Southern slaveholders, held 
recently in New York. Tt is a great mistake, to suppose 
that they have an over-proportion of youth. True it i?, 
that many young men, buoyant with virtuous expectation, 
of the soundest hearts and most cultivated minds, are 
swelling their number and adding to their etHciency, and 



MR. BIRNEY's letter. H 

ikat there are among them men venerable for age and wis- 
dom, w!io have done the state and church much service, 
and who must soon, according to the ordinary course of 
nature, be called hence to their reward, — yet the great 
body is made up of men of middle age, possessing in their 
fullest vigor all their natural and mental powers. Those 
who are reposing on what they have done — whose fame is 
built on the foundation of things as they are now, and 
who, in the greatness of their alarm at the least moral agi- 
tation of the community, seem to forget that ' God reigns,' 
or who are too inert and to much at ease for renewed effort 
to seize on the land that yet remains to be possessed ; 
such are rarely to be found in the busy and stirring ranks 
of abolitionism. 

Believing that, according to the promises of God, in the 
conversion of the world, and that his truth, wielded by 
human agency, is to be the great instrument to effect it, 
they have not been backward in giving their aid to every 
benevolent movement at all connected with this great ob- 
ject. For the support of foreign and domestic missions, 
for the largest distribution of the Bible, for Sunday 
schools, for the tract and education causes, and for the 
establishment and endowment of colleges, especially 
where most needed, they have been liberal in their dona- 
tions. 

Advocating principI/'S, and believing all that are truly 
such will, when faithfully developed and fully carried out 
into action, operate beneficially, abolitionists are thorough- 
going in favor of public moral reformation. Having aban- 
doned the use of ardent spirits because they contained alco- 
hol, and intoxicatingin their effects, they refraiji from every 
other drink that is alcoholic and that produces intoxication. 
Thus wine, cider, beer, and all the other disguises of alco- 
holic ooison are excluded from their use. If 1 mistake 



12 MR. birney's letter. 

not, tobacco has generally shared the same fate. In my 
journey, last spring, through Ohio to the east, where I was 
brought in company with a large number of abolitionists, 
I remember but one who seemed to be in the habitual use 
of tobacco. Some of them, and by no means a few of the 
younger abolitionists, from considerations of health and 
economy, as well as other reasons, have relinquished the 
use of tea and coffee, substituting for them, in most cases, 
water or milk. To my surprise, at many houses whose 
hospitality I received, in addition to tea and coffee at 
breakfast and supper, a pitcher of pure water was regu- 
larly placed on the table, and, to my still greater surprise, 
more frequent use was made of it than of other liquids. 

A large and growing number of them, by no means 
confined to the Friends, have embraced what are begin- 
ning to be known by the name o^ j)eace principles. These 
principles deny to nations the right of making war, either 
offensive or defensive, and to individuals the right of as- 
saulting others in any case, or of defending their persons 
or property, if it must be done at the expense of the guilty 
trespasser's life. These, say they, are the principles of 
the gospel ; in illustration of their beauty and excellency, 
they adduce the lives of the Saviour and his apostles. 

As a class, they are diligent in the conduct and man- 
agement of their ordinary business ; and it is believed not 
to be too much to say for them, that they are somewhat 
distinguished for their good faith and punctuality in the 
discharge of pecuniary engagements. Opposed to thea- 
tres, expensive pomps and parade of every kind, such of 
them as are engaged in profitable pursuits would soon 
grovy rich, were it not that they give so much of their mo- 
ney, as well as of their time and personal effort, to the be- 
nevolent causes which interest them. 

In domestic life, it is believed they are not behind any 



MR. birney's letter. 13 

other description of our fellow-citizens, in the exemplari- 
ness of their demeanor, nor do they appreciate less liighljr 
than others the happiness which springs from its endear- 
ments. 

As church members. — Notwithstanding the violent de- 
nunciations to which they have been subjected, even from 
their fellow-christians, because of their uncompromising 
advocacy of the cause of liberty as immediately connect- 
ed with the poor, and perishing, and neglected among us; 
no instance, so far as it is known, is to be found where 
they have been brought under the discipline of their 
churches for unchristian and disorderly conduct. 

As citizens. — They are not identified with any of the 
political parties into whichthe country is divided. So far 
from it, these parties seem desirous of commending them- 
selves to popular favor, each by outstrippmg its adversa- 
ries in their abuse, misrepresentation, and persecution of 
abolitionists. In elections, they vote by no party mandate, 
but as they individually believe to be most expedient. In 
every point of contact with government, they have shown 
themselves obedient to the laws, and faithful in the dis- 
charge of their civil duties. They allege, and it is believ- 
ed, truly, that in the prosecution of their object — the 
emancipation of the enslaved of t'lis Ian J, they have neith 
er liolated, nor intended to violate, any provision of the 
Constitution of the United States, or of the constitution 
or laws of any of the states. Of their yet having done so, 
or of their having written, up to this time, a single sentence 
which, even if the slaves of the South could read and had 
access to their writings, has any legitimate tendency to 
excite an insurgent spirit among the oppressed, they ut- 
terly deny, and demand other proof of it than is to be 
found in the furious clamor of slaveholders, who will not 
read their productions, or in the terror of mobs summon- 



14 MR. birney's letter. 

ed to the work of bloodshed and demolition by the ^ dough 
faces ' * of the North — panders to slaveholding avarice 
and passion — traitors to the wounded and almost expiring 
cause of liberty among themselves. 

Last spring, I attended the Ohio Anti-Slavery Conven- 
tion — was present at the several meetings of the American 
Anti-Slavery Society in New York, and at the Anti-Slave- 
ry Convention held in Boston. On these several occa- 
sions, I became acquainted, and deliberated with, it may 
be, not less than one thousand persons, who may be fairly 
set down as among the most intelligent of the abolitionists. 
Subjects on which the most diverse opinions were enter- 
tained, and which to ambitious and untrained minds would 
be agitating and dissentious in the extreme, were discuss- 
ed with the most calm and unruffled composure. And 
whilst some of the leading journals were teeming with the 
foulest and the falsest charges of moral and political tur- 
pitude, whilst there were produced in their assemblies, 
placards, calling on the mob for appropriate deeds, and 
designating the time and place of holding their meetings, 
that its violence might know at what point it might most 
effectually spend itself; yet not elsewhere have I seen so 
much of sedate deliberation, of sober conclusion, of dig- 
nified moderation, sanctified by earnest prayer to God, not 
only for the oppressed, but for the oppressor of his fellow ; 
not only for such as they loved, but for their slanderers, 
and persecutors, and enemies. 

The above is a fair account, so far as my knowledge 
enables me to speak, of the character of those whom you 
are pleased to describe as ' a band of fanatical abolition- 



*This word is nnt nseil in any malice, but hb the received and moat 
cotirenient designation of that class of persons who, residing la free states, 
yet ai'e tiie defenders of slavery. 



MR. birney's letter. 1I» 

ists.' Light and rash minds, unaccustomed to penetrate 
to the real causes of great revolutions in public sentiment, 
will, of course, think and speak contemptuously of them, 
whilst the philosophic observer clearly sees that such an- 
tagonists of error, armed with so powerful a weapon as the 
truths must at all times be invincible, and that in the end 
they will be triumphant. 

2. Their object is the abolition of slavery in the Unit- 
ed States. This is expressed in the constitution of the 
American Anti-Slavery Society, and is generally reiterat- 
ed in the constitutions of auxiliary societies. I safely 
hazard the assertion, that in the multiplied publications of 
the American Anti-Slavery Society — in all the speeches, 
and addresses, and discussions of its agents and intelligent 
advocates, no other object is proposed, and this only 
through the pctccr of the truth applied to the understand- 
ings and consciences of slaveholders, to persuade than to 
do their duty. Now, of me and the other gentlemen you 
have associated with me, you have published to the world 
that our ^ sole object' is * to sow the seed of discord, rap- 
ine, and murder among the slaves of the south,' and you 
affirm, as witnesses who know the truth, that we have so 
' AVOWED ' it. Knowing, as I do, that at the time you gave 
this testimony, there were no facts in existence to verify 
it, what now shall I say to you, as honorable men and as 
Christians, of your course ? I will not retort the language 
of abuse and vilification ; it is torn from my vocabulary. 
Can anything be said in extenuation more favorable, than 
that passion had usurped the seat of reason — banished 
memory from its station, and left you to the undisputed 
away of a disordered imagination, busy in the creation of 
her guilty figments? or that you are disciples of the reign- 
ing system of ethics, which makes a false statement less 
criminal when it is asserted of many than of few — of those 



16 MR, birney's letter. 

we call our enemies, than of our friends, or of those who 
are persecuted, than of those who are popular? Elect 
your own scheme of palliation ; still, as gentlemen and 
Christians, you owe it to the claims of honor and truth to 
furnish the evidence of your accusation, or with the mag- 
nanimity becoming both characters, acknowledge with 
contrition your shame for having preferred it. 

The object, then, of the abolitionists, is to bring slavery 
in the United States to a termination. Now, by itself, in- 
dependently of the means to be used, — which we will con- 
sider bye and bye, — it is a good object — one which I would 
not do you the injustice, for a moment, to suppose you 
would not heartily approve. I will not attribute to gentle- 
men of your respectability and intelligence, the slightest 
approximation io x\\A.i bridtism \v\\\q,\\ could delight — be- 
cause of its fitness and propriety — in seeing one race of 
men, year after year, generation after generation, century 
after century, increasing from tens to hundreds, from hun- 
dreds to thousands, from thousands to millions, performing 
unrequited toil, suffering bodily outrages and torments, 
and consigned to mental darkness and spiritual hopeless- 
ness, merely that another race might live in ease and indo- 
lence, and enjoy all the pleasures of despotic sway. Nor, 
will I suppose, if two strangers were to meet in a wilder- 
ness, and the stronger to reduce the weaker to the condi- 
tion of a southern slave, that you would refuse to unite 
even with the veriest * fanatic ' in the land, in raising 
against such violence and abuse, the loudest note of con- 
demnation ; nor that any right claimed by the oppressor 
could receive the least confirmation, or the wrong of the 
sufferer be at all mitigated, by the wrong-doer's pleading 
the habits of domination, and cruelty, and indulgence into 
which he and his fimily had fallen, from the long contin- 
uance of the relation his own outrage had set up. No, 



MR. birney's letter. 17 

gentlemen : in such a case, you would decide at once, and 
correctly too, that every moment's denial of the right was 
a continuance of the wrong, adding only aggravation to its 
intensity, and furnishing fresh reason for its termination. 

Nor, do I believe, hateful as is the very name of aboli- 
tionists to slaveholders, that you would refuse to mingle 
your sympathies with theirs, for the oppressed of other 
lands. In all our south, the tyrant Nicholas had not a 
friend, while he was drenching his hands in the blood of 
his Polish subjects, goaded by oppression to revolt. No : 
the faintest ray of hope for their success in vindicating 
their liberty, warmed your every heart ; the clang of the 
Polish falchion on the invader's casque, made music de- 
lightful to your ears ; whilst for every blade that was rais- 
ed by an arm that struck for liberty, your silent orisons 
went up, that it might descend with resistless energy upon 
the strongest of the oppressor's bands. Your prayers as- 
cended not for the staying of the pestilence, that was 
sweeping off the thousands of the foe — and when, at last, 
after the struggle of despair, the son of Poland's hope 
went down in tears of blood, it was followed by your tears 
of sorrow — whilst in mournful sympathy with the poet, 
you exclaimed — 

* Hope for a season bids the world farewell, 
And Freedom shrieked when Shrejeneski fell.' 

But stay — not so fast : Is it not 'fanatical,^ thus to suf- 
fer the honest feelings of your nature to go out for the op- 
pressed — and is it not ' incendiary ' for you here, to repro- 
bate the cruelty of the tyrant, or to commiserate the af- 
flictions of such contemptible ' disturbers of the peace ? ' 
There are two sides to every question. You have not yet 
heard the high-souled and chivalrous Emperor's account 
of this matter. You have not heard from his own lips of 
2* 



18 MR. birney's letter. 

the great * delicacy of the subject ' — nor have you properly 
appreciated his ' peculiar circumstances.' To your furi- 
ous zeal we may suppose him to reply, * You have forgot- 
ten aitoorether, that however wrong might have been the 
dismemberment of Poland, and the first reduction of its 
inhabitants to political servitude, that, now, they had be- 
come accustomed to it — that they were exceedingly de- 
graded* — totally unqualified for liberty, many of them 
being Jews, who will neither amalgamate with Christians, 
nor Christians with them — that, therefore, they never can 
be free in their native land — the only way to elevate them 
to a proper sense and enjoyment of freedom, being either 
to transport them to the hospitable and healthy shores of 
Palestine, (which is impossible,) or for me to retain the 
power I now possess over them, using it of course with a 
merciful discretion, as I have always done, and solely for 
their good , making them, as it were, candidates for free- 
dom, till, som.ehow or other, in the lapse of time, they may 
be inducted into its full fruition.' May it not be, too, you 
have overlooked that most manly and satisfactory of ex- 
euses for inveterate habits of oppression — that they were 
introduced by his very worthy autocratical ancestors, who, 
themselves being oppressors, had transmitted the fashion 
to their descendants, and now, without any agency of his, 
he had it ' 6?2/m7£:fZ ' on him. Beside, may he not well 
have urcred, that his power would be curtailed, his wealth 
diminished, and his princely ease broken in upon, by re- 
movincr the weight of his oppression 1 And still more 
fiercely, that the oppressed were his ^property' — that it 
was his own concern — that no other people knev/ anything 
about it, or had any interest in it — and that, if any cant- 



* ' The peasantry are in a wretched condition, dirty, improvident, indo- 
lent, addicted to intoxication, and, of course, poor.' 



MR. birney's letter. 19 

ing sympathy for his subjects (contented and happy he 
knew they were, if meddlers would let them alone) should 
be felt and expressed any where ; or, if a misguided phil- 
anthropy should attempt to convince him, that in the stores 
of heaven there is laid up wrath for the oppressor — or that 
it is better, safer, happier, to be served by willing subjects 
than reluctant slaves ; or if his neighbors should permit 
any discussion of the wrongs of tyrants and the rights of 
men, he should regard it as a hostile interference with his 
own peculiar despotical interests, calling, at least, for a 
withdrawal of his friendship, if not for open war upon the 
guilty. Now, in what light would you look upon such 
pleas as this 1 Now, I am sure, as the candid readers of 
an intelligent and honest mind, desiring to show mercy 
and do justice — but, rather, as the guilty subterfuges of a 
base, and seHish, and cowardly despot, who has the mean- 
ness to back w'iih threats, his feigned excuses for practis- 
ing an iniquity, he has not the magnanimity to forsake. 

Thus far, you and the abolitionists 'walk together,' in 
admiring the beauty and* comeliness of liberty. But at 
this point you separate. He loves her as a substantial good 
for himself, his neighbor, his country, the world : you ad- 
mire her as good in the ' abstract ' — or, as having her 
habitation at a distance — in Ireland — in Poland — or in 
Greece. But let her blazing beacon begin to sv/eep over 
the Atlantic and approach our shores, and its warmth be- 
gin to be felt near your cotton-bales, your rice-tierces, and 
your sugar-hogsheads — let but 

England's flag, — 
Proclaim that all around is free, 
From ' farthest Ind ' to each blue crag, 
That beetles o'er the wetitein sea; — 

and, oh, how fanatical! how visionary 1 how suicidal to 
her own interests, how destructive to those of the oppress- 
ed ! and how injurious to her neighbors ! 



20 MR. birney's letter. 

Now, what a shame is this! Lovers of freedom, arc 
ye ? — and well content that her fires should blaze, and 
warm and purify abroad — whilst, at home, they must be 
extinguished, and your own house left desolate and dark! 
Lovers of liberty, are ye ? — and yet, whilst the abolition- 
ist is striving to uprear her fallen standard in our country, 
that all the world may see its broad folds, waving in the 
purest air of heaven, representing in letters of sunlight, 
that, ALL MEN are entitled to Liberty — with myrmidon 
bands you rush to seize, that you may consume it in the 
furnace of a sugar house, or bury it forever in the marshes 
of a rice-field. 

The importance of the object is by no means diminish- 
ed, when it is seen how rapidly slavery is insinuating it- 
self into the very religion of the American church. Time 
was — and it ended but a little while ago — when slavery 
was deplored in the south, not only as an evil of large di- 
mensions, but as a transgression of the great law of love; 
which, whilst it could not be justified, yet some palliation 
was found for it, in the peculiar circumstances of that por- 
tion of the country — and a hope often expressed, that, in 
some way or other, it might terminate. No section of the 
church was then found so besotted as to become its ad- 
vocate and supporter on principle, and boldly take God's 
book of love as their warrant for holding their brethren in 
a bondage, unequalled for its enormities even among Ma- 
homedans or Pagans of modern times ; nor so reckless of 
all decent regard to their character, as to challenge the 
praise of men for the meliorated condition of the enslaved 
here, as to morals and physical comforts, above what it 
would have been had they remained in Africa ; or to set 
off against their iniquity the ^ew instances of conversion 
to Christ, by which God, in the greatness of his mercy, 
had chosen to exalt his name, and make it glorious, among 



MR. birney's letter. 21 

the down-trodden and perishing of a Christian land. Yet, 
all this has been done — not by a few ignorant and iron- 
hearted slave-driving professors of religion, but by the 
accredited organs of different churches in the south, 
claiming high stations on the scale of general intelligence, 
biblical knowledge and spiritual purity. 

Now, I ask you, if to men zealous for the honor of God, 
and for the glory of his church, is it nothing which should 
rouse them to effort, to see such a system of ' peace on 
earth and good will to men,' menacincr the whole land by 
its rapidly extending and darkening influence? Is it noth- 
ing that should animate them to holy, untiring action to 
see millions of their countrymen and fellow creatures in 
chains, in their midst — to know that each day their chains 
are becoming heavier and more galling ; to witness gener- 
ation succeeding generation, with minds sunk deeper in 
ignorance, and hearts in savageism — whilst fron) multi- 
tudes of them is forced the exclamation of hope beginning 
to despair, 'How long, Lord 1' And shall all this exist, 
and its continuance be insisted on — shall it become indu- 
rated, and this too by the sanction of a church professing 
to be God's, and by a people professing before Him and 
the world to have put on bowels of compassion, and to 
have the niirjd that was in Christ! and none be found to 
* cry aloud, to spare not, to lift up their voice like a trum- 
pet, and show his people their transgressions, and the 
house of Jacob their sins?' 

I do not intend here to enter into any scriptural exegesis 
to prove to you that the form of oppression called slave- 
holding is sinful, awfully sinful before God, because it is 
the greatest wrong you can do to your neighbor. I know 
with what nimbleness you fly from the light of the existing 
dispensation to the comparative darkness of the^i«s^ ; and 
how, like the unhappy Gadarene possessed with an un- 



22 MR. birney's letter. 

clean spirit, you have made your dwelling among the 
tombs (of Abraham and Moses;) and how always, night 
and day, you are cutting yourselves with stones, and cry- 
ing out to every one who would draw you thence, * Tor- 
ment me not ! ' I will not pursue you thither ; but of you 
who profess to be Christians, I would ask and with no 
taunting or insulting purpose — Has the thing called slave- 
ry, as you 'practice it, (and I do not intend to say that in 
the treatment of your slaves you differ from your neigh- 
bors,) been found, at any time, propitious to your Chris- 
tian growth, or to a closer walk with God ? Have you 
not, (especially the ' bishop' on your committee) on whip- 
ping a fellow being, to extract from him services which 
only slavery authorizes you to demand, had some misgiv- 
ings that you are, what God has said you ought not to be, 
* a striker?' When you wrest from him all the avails of 
his labor, except what will keep him in good condition to 
renew it, does it never occur to you that you are ' greedy 
of filthy lucre,' ' covetous? ' And when you are under the 
necessity, even though it be to maintain the discipline that 
slavery calls for, of cutting and slashing, by yourself or 
your overseer, some half a dozen of your poor and help- 
less brethren, whom, you say, God has committed to your 
care, does it never strike you as somewhat inconsistent 
with w hat he has told you by his messenger, ' The servant 
of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle to all men?' 
Again : has it never once entered into your minds, whilst 
attending the marts for human flesh, established in your 
towns and villages, that the slaver who supplies them is but 
your agent; and while he recounts to you his horrible ad- 
ventures — of husbands without a moment's warning torn 
from the wives of their bosom, and loaded with chains and 
driven like cattle for a thousand miles, on the high-ways 
of this Christian land ; of the wife and mother, in the 



MR. birney's letter. '23 

phrenzy of separation, calling on heaven and earth to re- 
store to her the husband and children of her love, and to 
blast the wretch who is tearing her from them forever ; 
now standing before you in the stillness of despair, the 
tear, started by the memory of former joys, humble as they 
were, coursing its way down her worn and haggard cheeks? 
Have you geen this, and has not conscience, stifled and 
sepulchred as it has almost been, still wrung from you the 
silent acknowledgment, this is my ivork? When you are 
casting in your contributions to provide for the distribution 
of the Bible in foreign lands, what are your feelings on 
recollecting that you withhold it from your ♦ domestic cir- 
cle,' whose peace and quietness so much concern you 1 
And does it cheer you, while praying for the heathen of 
distant climes, to have the idea rise up before your minds, 
that you are, as far as in you lies, maintaining here in your 
own country, at your own doors, in your own families, a 
system which in one month brings into being, rears and 
conducts to death, more heathen than than all Christendom 
has reclaimed from their idols and their vices, by the ef- 
forts, the expenditures and the sacrifices of fifty years? 

Jn the stillness of the evening, whilst your wJiite family 
are assembled around God's altar, and are raising the song 
of praise or uniting in the prayer of faith, does the sound 
of the overseer's lash, or the distant cry of his victim suf- 
fering the penalty of an unexecuted task, infuse fervor in- 
to your petitions, or add richness to your symphonies ? Or, 
when on the holy Sabbath, for the refreshment of your 
own souls, you frequent the place where God's honor dwell- 
eth, does it add fuel to the fire of your devotions, to know 
that your twenty, fifty, or it may be, your one hundred 
slaves, worn down by the labors of the by-gone week, are 
dozing away their time in their hovels, or roaming over the 
country like vagabonds, with no one, not even those who 



24 MR. birney's letter. 

claim their guardianship hy providential allotment, to care 
for their souls ; and that there is not present one to receive 
with you the blessings of a time and place so hallowed ? 
And when you are receiving the sacred emblems of Christ's 
body and blood, your souls banqueting at the table of his 
love ; at one moment melted into tears at the recollection 
of his sufferings for you, at the next swelling out with the 
joys, unutterable yet irrepressible, of his great salvation, 
does it never rush like the sudden pang of death to your 
hopes, that you are joined hand in hand with oppressors 
who have power, deliberately, willfully, and this too, for 
the gold whose rust shall eat your flesh as fire, to withhold 
from your ' neighbors ' around you all knowledge of that 
salvation, all participation in its hopes and all the exulta- 
tion of its joys ? 

I know how this cancer on your minds affects the most 
conscientious among you. Therefore, of such I confident- 
ly ask, if the oppression of the colored race among you, 
as you practise it, is not an undying worm, gnawing, day 
and night, into the very core of your religious enjoyments; 
and if you do not find, however good and gentle when 
compared with others you may be, in tlie treatment of yoyr 
slaves, that slavery, as it exists in your own ' domestic cir- 
cle ' day after day, and hour after hour, is distilling its 
odious and filthy poison into your otherwise pure and spir- 
itual cup? And how can it be otherwise whilst (to use 
the eloquent language of another) you are making men 
property, God's image merchandize, sinking to the level 
of brutes beings ranked and registered by God a little 
lower than the angels, wresting from their rightful own- 
ers the legacies which their Maker has bequeathed them, 
inalienable birthright-endowments, exchanged for no 
equivalent, unsurrendered by volition and unforfeited by 
crime — breaking open the sanctuary of human rights and 



MR. birney's letter. 25 

making its sacred things common plunder — drivincr to the 
shambles Jehovah's image herded with four-footed beasts 
and creeping things, and bartering for vile dust the pur- 
chase of a Redeemer's blood and the living members of 
his body? How can it be otherwise, whilst you are main- 
taining a system which derides the sanctity with which 
God invests the domestic relations, annihilates marriage, 
makes void parental authority, nullifies filial obligation, 
invites the violation of chastity by denying it legal protec- 
tion, thus bidding God speed to lust as it riots at noon-day 
glorying in the immunities of law? Are you looking for 
the g?^c at peace that IS promised to them who love God's 
law, whilst, in defiance of all the light God has given you, 
you maintain a system which stamps as a crime obedience 
to tlie command, ' Search the scriptures,' repeals the Imv 
of love, abrogates the 'golden rule,' exacts labor without 
recompense, authorizes the forcible sundering of kindred, 
and cuts off forever from the pursuit of happiness? Do 
you hope for the ' peace ' which tlio f?^.vionr left his follow- 
ers, whilst you persist in a course wdiich prohibits the ac- 
quisition of knowledge by the terror of penalties, eclipses 
intellect, stifles the native instincts of the heart, precipi- 
tates in death, damps the upward aspirations of the spirit, 
startles its victims with present perils, peoples the future 
with apprehended horrors, palsies the moral sense, whelms 
in despair, and ' kills the soul ? ' 

If slavery is now despoiling you of your Christian peace 
and polluting your spiritual enj ;yments ; if it is rendering^ 
you not only inefficient, but by your example injurious, in 
the great work of evangelizing the world ; if, in fine, it 
has so corrupted the church that she is beginning to re- 
ceive as one of her dogmas, that the bitterest form of op- 
pression known to the world may not be displeasing to 
God, or opposed to his word, it would seem almost useless 
3 



26 MR. birney's letter. 

to look to any other quarter whatever for its beiiefits. But 
lest it should be supposed we would withhold what you 
might regard as benefits, we will bring into brief review 
such of them as may be cnWed political — their connection 
with the great principles of our government, and the cause 
of universal freedom. 

When we were in our utmost need, straining not only 
to produce united action among ourselves, but for the 
good opinion and sympathy of the world, we proclaimed 
as a truth fundamental to all governments, that ' all men 
are created equal, and possess rights that are inalienable 
to their lives, their liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' 
At this you have jeered — you have baptised it ' a rhetor- 
ical flourish ; ' you have ridiculed it, as well as the distin- 
guished revolutionary statesman who first conceived and 
published it, and you have, from the time of its promulga- 
tion till now, lived down, and continue to live down, as 
much as in you lies, this great truth, without which our 
government is no longer worthy of a serious effort for its 
preservation. 

What has slavery, acting through the south, done for 
the freedom of speech and of the press, those great con- 
servatives of our government? I will tell you: She has 
used the refinements of metaphysics and the delusions of 
sophistry to explain away the obvious meaning of consti- 
tutional provisions enacted for their preservation ; she has 
claimed for herself the peculiar favoritism of the Consti- 
tution of the United States ; she has reared herself aloft 
on a bloody throne, demanding, with lash in hand, of states 
sovereign as herself, that all their rights should bow in 
submission to her and * do her reverence; ' that. her dig- 
nity must be regarded as a thing too holy to be handled j 
and that these common rights of the people be restrained 
lest her sacred mysteries be profaned by men of * unclean 



MR. birney's letter. 27 

lips ; ' and the secret things of her penetralia be exposed 
by freemen to the rude gaze of a vulgar world. 

What has it done for the security of the citizens under 
the Constitution and laws of the land ? You shall hear : 
She has mocked at Constitutions and laws ; she has raised 
up tribunals unknown and opposed to them both ; she has 
instituted inquisitions and invested them with power to 
execute punishments, not only of disgrace, but even unto 
death ; she has set aside the trial by jury, and freemen of 
our country have been apprehended on suspicion, and 
without any charge of crime known to the laws, they have 
been shamefully treated ; they have been ignominiously 
scourged, as slaves are scourged ; and they have been ex- 
ecuted on the boughs of your trees, whilst the once sacred 
appeal, 'lam an American citizen,^ has been drowned by 
the deafening shouts of a law-contemning rabble. 

She has offered large rewards for the forcible and felon- 
ious abduction of some of the most worthy citizens of 
other States, for the exercise of rights guaranteed to them 
by the constitutions under which they live, and by her own 
also. 

She has preferred indictments and had them returned 
true bills, against the citizens of other governments, who 
have never been within her jurisdiction ; who are not 
bound on any principle, to possess a knowledge of her 
laws, merely, that she might have a pretence to get them 
into her power. You assert, they have violated your laws ; 
yet you have offered no proof by the publication of a sin- 
gle statute. Until you do this, it is fearlessly affirmed that 
they have not viulated a single statute of a southern state, 
for which they could be convicted by an honest and im- 
partial court and jury. 

The south allege, that the opposers of slavery excite 
their slaves to discontent and insurrection. You have had 
no insurrection of which you have condescended to give 



28 MR. birney's letter. 

the proof. It is confidently said, that you are unable, by 
evidence of a credible character, to connect any abolition- 
ist with any actual or meditated insurrection, either by his 
personal agency, or by means of any anti-slavery publica- 
tions On the contrary, yon have gone to the north, and 
by your personal agency, and your publications, have 
stirred up the disorderly and the lawless of the cities to re- 
peated insurrections against the constitutions and laws of 
several of the states ; you have forcibly prevented the peo- 
ple from ' peaceably assembling,' and discussing the propri- 
ety of ' petitioning the government for a redress of griev- 
ances ; ' you have violated the constitutional * right of the 
people, to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and ef- 
fects from unreasonable searches and seizures;' you have 
excited your instruments to war against associations of un- 
offending and respectable females ; to trample under their 
unhallowed feet, in the person of an American citizen, the 
most sacred immunities of law, and to shout their fierce tri- 
umphs over constitutional rights, and to celebrate their foul 
orgies in the face of day, and almost in the vestibule of the 
venerated ' cradle of liberty.' 

But this is not all. You have threatened the north with 
a cessation of friendly intercourse — to bar out her teachers, 
and her ministers of religion ; to put in practice an intoler- 
able system of individual espoinage ; you liave appealed to 
her avarice ; you have taunted her with meanness ; you 
have flouted her for her mercenary spirit, and have insulting- 
ly boasted, that sooner than lose the profits of your com- 
merce, the factorage of your sugar hogsheads and your cot- 
ton bales, she would unite with you in the persecution of 
her own citizens, and readily surrender in the persons of 
abolitionists, rights, \\\\\c\\ their forefathers ' pledged their 
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor ' to defend. 

More than this ; you have set up yourself on high, ar 
in the tone of superiority, issued your mandate to the ft , 



MR. birney's letter. 29 

states, that they touch not slavery in the District of Colum- 
bia, that they petition not their representatives in Congress 
to remove from the purlieus of the capitol this shame and 
dishonor of our nation ; you demand, that the Union be 
surrendered into your power, to be eviscerated of all that 
is essential to its vitality, personal security, the right of 
assembling peaceably and petitioning for a redress of griev- 
ances, the freedom of the press and of speech, &c. &c., 
under the penalty of its destruction, should your demand 
be resisted. 

All these things, so far as they were practicable, you 
have done. The facts, and the shame of your exulting in 
them, have been bruited through the land, till they are 
* familiar as household words.' What remains to be done, 
you are laboring to accomplish, by the strongest means in 
your power — by your legislators, your judiciary, and by 
holding out, in the shape of rewards, temptations for en- 
tering your service, to the most unprincipled, profligate 
and rapacious of our population. Such a course of con- 
duct would be looked upon, even by a semi-barbarous peo- 
ple, as monstrous; and, were the proof not before them, 
almost as fabulous and pertaining to a state of society still 
more primitive. Judge, then, with what an honest indig- 
nation it must be viewed, by a civilized and a Christian 
people ; by a people yet free ; to whom all the rights you 
have so often and so insultingly trampled on are still pre- 
cious, and by whom, those you yet demand to have sur- 
rendered to you, are considered as indispensable to their 
happiness and their existence as a community ! And what 
recompense do you propose to them for a relinquishment 
of their rights as a people? None — absolutely none. 
But surely some great advantage will accrue ioyourselves, 
some signal and enduring benefit will be secured to you 
and your posterity from such a sacrifice of principle. And 
3* 



so MR. birney's letter. 

what is it? No more than this — that you may continue 
to sell and buy your fellow-creatures, as merchandize, and 
live in ease, and in splendor, on your neighbor's toil with- 
out wages. Is it any thing more than this? Is not this, 
and this only, the very pith and marrow of your desires, 
that you may be permitted, without one check of con- 
science, to maintain a system directly hostile to the great 
foundation principle of our government; one that is palsy- 
ing her moral power and bringing dishonor upon her in 
the eyes of her civilized peers ; that has already jeopard- 
ed, and is still, more and more, daily jeoparding our integ- 
rity as a nation ; which sets at defiance the Almighty, 
who has invariably pursued it with his curse, demonstrat- 
ed in the corruption and effemination of every people who 
have persisted in maintaining it? 

And now, gentlemen, it may be, that your objections to 
my manner of telling you the truth, may very naturally 
lead me to the consideration of the means used by the 
abolitionists for accomplishing their object. This reply 
having already extended to a greater length than I would 
wish, were I able to embody the same matter in a smaller 
compass. I will, on this concluding topic, be as brief as 
its nature and importance will allow. Suffer me to pre- 
mise a single remark — one which, I doubt not, in its ap- 
plication to other subjects, you will admit to be correct — 
that the manner of enforcing the truth does by no means 
excuse those to whom it is addressed from the obligation 
which the knowledge of it imposes. All men who are 
engaged in a course of life for which their consciences 
have arraigned and condemned them, time after time, but 
who, with a full determination to persist, have drugged it 
with opiates, till it has fallen asleep, and has been chain- 
ed, are pleased with a gentle manner, with the slightest 
tap at the door of its cell. They will bear aad cheerfully 



MR. birney's letter. 31 

too, any pleasing sounds which will but soothe its slumber. 
But if we come in the spirit of John, who reproved an 
incestuous tyrant for his sin, or of Him who said, ' If thy 
right eye offend thee, pluck it out ' — ' If thy right hand 
offend thee, cut it off,' and rudely stave in the door, and 
with rattling peals of thunder rouse up its slumbering ten- 
ant, striking off his chains, and giving him full enlarge- 
ment, with commands to execute his saving offices, forth- 
with it is said, ' He hath a devil.' Now, if you will bear 
it, the abolitionist, who has roused your sleeping con- 
science, and turned it loose unchained, has not the devil. 
During the snug and dornmuse sleep of conscience, this 
same devil with his confederates, had entered the apart- 
ments slavery had provided for him — finding them empty, 
swept and garnished, he had taken up his abode in them 
and was quietly, yet effectually, doing his destructive 
deeds. This is he who is fired with rage, and alarmed for 
his safety, and who makes such mighty outcry at seein(y, 
free and unfettered, his great adversary. Conscience, Go(i' 9, 
vicegerent, clothed in his power, exulting in His micrht, 
and, like a giant refreshed with wine, sweeping to his re- 
venge.* 

But we will proceed to particularize objections: 
1. You allege that the anti-slavery publications are 
' incendiary^ — meaning by this, that they are clcsigjicd, by 
abolitionists, and that they do actually tend to excite the 
slaves to insurrection against their masters. If such was 
really their purpose, they pursue the most unwise means 



* A very ancient barber, who had handled many an honored revolutionary 
head, was sometimes called to perform his professional offices on that of 
the venerable Dr. Smith, President of Princeton College. He held the 
Dr. in the highest possible respect — except in his moments of intoxication. 
When the fit was on him, and he was staggering- about the street, if the 
Dr. came in sight, he was charged with doing the very things which tha 
barber was enacting. The application I leave to you. 



32 MR. birney's letter, 

for its accomplishment. Acting as shey do, with this de- 
sign before them — in addition to the names of ' fanatics ' 
and * incendiaries/ so liberally bestowed on them, they 
could easily establish their claim to the still more unenvi- 
able one of ' fools.' But let me ask of you, in all sober- 
ness and christian charity, to consider the reasons I shall 
give to prove the total improbability of such a design be- 
ing indulged by the abolitionists : 

1. Their principles as they have avowed them are, as I 
said in a preceding part of this answer, opposed to vio- 
lence and war, even for the attainment of right. Their 
conscientious adherence to them they have evinced in the 
many fiery trials to which they have recently been called 
— in the abuse and dangers to which their persons and 
their lives have been exposed, and in the unexampled per- 
secutions (for this day and country) which the fierce spirit 
of southern slavery has roused up against them even at 
their own doors. 

2. Having for their object, not only the emancipation 
of the slaves, but their happiness — to be secured, under 
God, by intellectual and religious improvement — they are 
opposed to all violence on their part, knowing that it would 
end only in their utter extermination, or in a still baser 
and more hopeless subjection of the survivors. 

3. They cannot have, as a body of men, any purpose 
peculiar to them, of a selfish character, to secure — being 
found of almost every religious denomination, of every 
political party, of every age and pursuit, and condition 
in life — farmers, mechanics, manufacturers, merchants^ 
preachers, doctors, lawyers, ^z. &c. 

4. They address nothing to the slaves — the class to be 
excited — but all to the masters, against whom insurreetioR 
is to be excited. This, for such a purpose, would be a 
course too ineffably stupid, even for the high-pressure fan* 



MR. birney's letter, 33 

aticism of the abolitionists, because it puts the whole of 
the exciting materia! into the hands of those interested to 
destroy it. 

5. The slaves are unable to read. Of the 200,000 
slaves now probably in Alabama, I confidently venture 
the assertion, that there are not 200 who can read under- 
standiiigly a single tract published at the anti-slavery of- 
fice. The publications, so far as the reading is concern- 
ed, would be as harmless, if scattered through your parlors, 
and on your sofas, and your tables, as so many treatises on 
astronomy or phrenology. Ah ! but you exclaim, ' The 
pictures! the pictures ! These are what will madden ihe 
slave and rouse him up to fury.' And do you believe that 
the bare wood-cut representation of an overseer flogging 
some two or three crouching slaves, will produce such 
an effect, when the reality, witnessed many times a day, 
on the large plantations, fails to do ii ? Or, that i\\Q pic- 
ture of a man in chains — such as that to which Whittier's 
thrilling appeal to his country is attached, a few lines of 
which I have before quoted ; or of a drove of their fel- 
low-sufferers urged on in fetters and hand-cuffs to some 
more distant shambles along the highways, and without 
any attempt at concealment — do you, I say, believe that 
such a sight in picture would produce a furious out-break, 
when the commonness of the thinor itself, has brouo-ht the 
slaves to look on it with entire composure and indiffer- 
ence ? Whatever the mass of slaveholders may believe, 
the intelligent among you do not believe it. They know 
there is no philosophy in it, any more than there would 
be, were you trying to rouse up a friend to proper efforts 
to relieve himself and family from the ills of poverty, in 
presenting before him the picture of the ills he was suffer- 
ing ; or in holding up a drowning man, that he might be 



34 MR. birney's letter. 

induced to put forth still greater exertions, the picture of 
a man catching at straws. 

(3. Admitting the slaves were all abletoread, they would 
find nothing in the anti-slavery publications to encourage 
them to a vindication of their natural rights by force. They 
would find on many of the covers to the tracts, &c., such sin- 
gular stimulants to insurrection as the following taken from 
the third Article of the Constitution of the American Anti- 
Slavery Society, and repeated in almost all the constitutions 
of her auxiliaries — ' This Society will never, in any way, 
countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by re- 
sorting to physical force.' In the multiplied tales, fabri- 
cated to connect abolitionists with the recent servile 
tumults, whether real or imaginary, of the South, there has 
been wo proof , so far as I know, of any effect having been 
produced in exciting them by any of the anti-slavery pub- 
lications. Nor did even Murell, whom, without any elec- 
tion on our part, you have imposed on the community as 
Puntifex Blaximus of all abolitionists, nor any of his con- 
federates think so highly of them as to use them for 
agents, however subordinate, in furthering their nefarious 
plans. To conclude this part of the subject, there are ex- 
ceedingly /ci^? if any well authenticated instances of anti- 
glavery publications being found in the hands of the slave 
population ; none, of their having any agency in produc- 
ing the late alarms in the slave states, and none of any 
member of an anti-slavery association, having had> either 
directly or indirectly, any agency in producing these 
alarms. 

But again : the abolitionists call hard Dames that cannot 
be borne. Now, it is very true, and we all are witnesses 
how difficult it is to bear their application to ourselves. 
Yet they ought not to throw off its centre any well-regu- 
lated mind. If charged falsely, we should most generaHf 



35 

disregard it, and live down the falsehood. If truly, we 
should be admonished {fas est ah hosfe doceri) to reform 
that part of our life which has brought the bad name upon 
us. Sure it is, however, if the balance be struck between 
abolitionists and their opposers, the latter will be found to 
have overpaid them, in an amount so great, and in a coin 
so pure, and so thoroughly unadulterated with the alloy of 
moderation, or respect, or restraint, that its repayment 
must be utterly and forever despaired of. However, to a 
brief answer to the objection. 

There were, doubtless, in the days of Paul, a class of 
men well described as ' men-stealers.' The Meditera- 
nean, and the smaller seas connected with it, Avere great- 
ly infested by pirates, an important branch of whose busi- 
ness was man-stealing. Whenever they were able to 
overpower a village or settlement, and near the coast, 
they seized on the inhabitants, reduced them to bonds, 
and sold them in other lands for slaves. So formidable 
had they become in the time of Pompey the great, that his 
eulogist, Cicero, in one of his most labored and eloquent 
orations, makes it ground of high praise, in recounting 
Pompey's merits as a commander, that he had conducted 
to a fortunate conclusion the piratical war. It may have 
been to such piratical man-stealers that the apostle especi- 
ally referred. It is true, he does not mention as a class, 
distinct from the actual kidnappers, those who became the 
purchasers, and the holders, and users, through life, of their 
fellow-men thus reduced to bondage. Vv^e are left to con- 
jecture as to the probability that his bold and honest 
mind did not discern any real difference, and that he had 
not penetrated to the prevailing distinction of our more 
enlightened age, which makes such wide discrimination 
between the guilt of the original captors and that of the 
Tery unfortunate gentlemen on whom the 'entail' has 



36 MR. birney's letter. 

fallen. He may have thought as you would, in a case 
where one of your half-fed negroes breaks into your meat- 
house at midnight, and after satisfying his present hunger, 
sells the surplus spoil to an unworthy white neighbor — the 
latter knowing that the meat ivas stolen. Here, yoU hesi- 
tate not to stigmatize the purchaser, by the same name 
you would use in describing the actual rogue, and to as- 
sign to him, as worthy of it, disgrace and punishment pro- 
portioned to the elevation of his intelligence above that of 
the slave. Yet, he was not the thief — he only took, re- 
tained, and used — and this, in all probality, too, after hav- 
ing paid for it — property stolen from its rightful owner. 
But no one would be thought uncharitable under any code 
of ethics with which I am acquainted, who should, in 
speaking of the purchaser as connected with this transac- 
tion, describe him as a thief, or his children as thieves, if 
they were to permit the stolen property to be ' entailed ' 
on them, or to use it as their own with a full knowledge 
of the circumstances under which it was introduced into 
the family. And for this very simple reason — the moral 
turpitude contracted is as great in the one case as in the 
other; the circumstances of their offences differ, but the 
subject-matter, the substance of them is the same. How- 
ever ne::essary it may be for the purposes of judicial in.- 
yesti'Tation to make a distinction in describing the two 
offences — in moraJs there is none called for ; they are both 
thieves of the same grade.* 

Will you not find it difficult on applying the same moral 
code to the man-stealer and the man-buyer, to arrive at a 
different conclusion as to their comparative guilt? I wilf 
.•nercly state the case, leaving you to make the applica« 



* For the sake of the argument, I have suppoeed tlie slave to have no rigjit 
o the stolen property. 



MR. birney's letter. 37 

tion. A poor sans culottes heatlien prince, on the coast 
of Africa — say for instance, ' King Joe Harris,' or ' Lono- 
Peter,' with some fifty or sixty followers in the same trim 
with their leige lords, as to their outward man, inflamed 
with rum, bedazzled by a few beads and trinkets; equip- 
ped with musket, powder and ball, pike and cutlass, pur- 
chased by the slaver at a neighboring colony, sets upon 
his unsuspecting neighbors in the dead of night — kills the 
old and the resisting; overpowers the weak, and delivers 
them in chains to their instigator ; Jic, to the civilized, the 
educated, the enlightened American, who, within the 
sound of the bell that calls him to hear God's messages of 
woe — if they were but preached — against the oppressor of 
his brother — buys, retains, and uses for his own advan- 
tage, well knowing the manner in which the spoil came 
into the slaver's hands. Now, tell me, where, in morals, 
is the difference in amount of guilt? Does the g?^eat£7' 
lie on the untaught African, or on the refined American I 
— Shall the heathen be denounced as the man-stealer- — ■ 
the intermediate agents have heaped on him all the foul 
names that language can forge, whilst he who consum- 
mates the whole transaction, without whom the plunder of 
his fellow-man could not be continued a single year, is 
looked upon as entitled to cur most delicate regards, our 
tenderest sympathies ; in fine, as a very unfortunate, yet 
as a very interesting and christian gentleman ? Is this 
the judgment according to God's standard 1 I speak as 
unto wise men— judge ye. 

A few words more, and I have done. The South say, 
they will have no argument on the subject of slavery. 
Why not? Does it not concern them? Do they not un- 
derstand it ? Have they nothing to lose by a wrong, and 
nothing to save by a right decision ? Has a dogged sul» 
lenness beset them — and do they suppose that this will 
4 



38 MR. birney's letter. 

arrest the inquisition now making by the people of this 
nation into this abuse inveterated by two hundred years 
of disgraceful duration ? Strange resolve ! Strange ex- 
pectation ! Persisted in, nothing could furnish stronger 
evidence of that dementation in a community, which, it is 
said, is the forerunner of its destruction. Already is the 
subject of slavery infixed on the m'mds o{ ih^ American 
people. HcBret lethalis arundo — you might as well com- 
mand the lungs not to inhale the surrounding atmosphere 
for which nature made them, and by whose inspirations 
they perform their functions, as the public mind not to 
welcome a discussion, so well fitted to call forth its ener- 
gies and engage its noblest powers. Neither Southern 
legislation, dictated by passion and written in blood — nor 
yet its most faithful execution — any more than the brick- 
bats and bludgeons and city mobs of the North, can ex- 
clude it. A decision will he made — it is with you to make 
it one of tremendous calamity — to yourselves; or one 
which shall raise this whole nation from her dishonorable 
dust, and show her to the world clothed in the garments of 
love, and honor, and mercy, and truth. Come, then, and 
like men, sird yourselves for the contest, and let it be one 
of reason and of mind — not of passion and abuse. On 
you, especially, devolves the duty of aiding in the inves- 
tigation. You have an inexhaustible store of facts — you 
profess, alone, to understand it, and make light of the pre- 
tensions of others. You cannot escape the guilt of a re- 
fusal. I invhe you, without cost, to the use of the Phi- 
lanthropist. Through its columns your voice may be raised, 
and your arguments carried to the remotest corner of the 
land. 

To such of you as are called by the name of Christ, 
and through you to all others in the South, coming under 
the same description, I desire affectionately to address the 



MR. birney's letter. 39 

last words of this reply. You are brought, in God's pio- 
vidence, to a fearful crisis. Never, before, has it been 
with you as it is now. His light has chased the darkness 
that for two hundred years brooded over the American 
mind in relation to the oppression of our brother. The 
signs of the times give assurance that this sin is to be 
banished not only from our own country, but from the 
world. It will be done by human instrumentality. In 
every great work of reform, on whom does God bestow 
the honor of beginning it? On his Church. Of whom 
does he ask sacrifices of love ? Of his Church — of those 
for whom he has forgiven much. On whom does he call 
for leaders in his works of righteousness ? On his Church ; 
on those for whom he gave his Son to die. Whom does 
he summon to take the first step, though it call for self- 
denial, and be beset with peril even unto death? His 
Church — those to whom he said * nothing shall harm you.' 
Yet you refuse! — you not only i-pfnsp^ hut yon stand in 
the breach, beating back the friends of righteousness, with 
the very influence God bestowed on you to be used only 
in warfare for Him. And what is your excuse ? li ivill 
ruin the country — immediate righteousness icill desolate the 
South, and convert its rich fields into heathen deserts. Is 
this plea true? Has God ever required righteous action 
from any people and left them to suffer for their obedi- 
ence? All history says. No. But, admit it to be true, 
and that you are brought to suffer in your estate, to have 
your ease broken in upon, and your temporal enjoyments 
curtailed. What of that? Granted the condition is a bad 
one. But one, infinitely worse is, to live and to die in the 
perpetration of a sin, against which God has, more than 
against any other, uttered his hot displeasure, and to ap- 
pear with it, unrepented of, at his judgment seat. Will 
you, can you venture your soul's salvation there, on this 



40 MR. birney's letter. 

plea — that, breaking the bands of slavery which you have 
fastened on your brother, will injure you in your circum- 
stances, or that you will be under the necessity of remov- 
ing, with your families, to some more Northern clime, less 
genial to your health and habits ? You cannot, as a 
Christian, you know you dare not — nay, you know it would 
be better for you at once to surrender your claim of pro- 
pca'ty in Uhe widows, the fatherless, the stranger, and the 
poor ' to them, its rightful owners; to abandon your plan- 
tations, and all the apparatus for their culture, with your 
crops of cotton, and rice, and sugar, as spoil to your first 
successors, and fly for a residence to the coldest regions 
of the North, than die, defying the Almighty in this thing. 
That the Lord may accompany the foregoing remarks- 
with his blessing, and make them instrumental in the ad- 
vancement of his glory on earth — of your best interests, 
and those of our country, is the earnest desire of your 
friend Tin(\ fellow-r.itiy.en. 

JAMES G. BIRNEY. 
Cincinnati, Dec. 9, 1835. 



PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY 
SOCIETY. 

To the President of the United States : 

Sir, — In your message to Congress of the 7th instant, 
are the following passages: '1 must also invite your at- 
tention to the painful excitement produced in the South, 
by attempts to circulate through the mails, inflammatory 
appeals, addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints 
and in various sorts of publications, calculated to stimulate 
them to insurrection, and produce all the horrors of a ser- 
vile war. There is, doubtless, no respectable portion of 
our countrymen, who can be so far misled as to feel any 
other sentiment than that of indignant regret, at conduct 
so destructive of the harmony and peace of the country, 
and so repugnant to the principles of our national com- 
pact, and to the dictates of humanity and religion^ You 
remark, that it is fortunate that the people of the North 
have ' given so strong and impressive a tone to the senti- 
ments entertained against the proceedings of the mis-guid- 
ed persons who have engaged in these unconstituti-snal and 
wicked attempts.^ And you proceed to suggest to Con- 
gress, ' the propriety of passing such a law as will pro- 
hibit, under severe penalties, the circul-ation in the South- 
ern states, through the mails, of incendiary publications, 
intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection' 

A servile insurrection, a^ experience has shown, in- 
volves the slaughter of the whites, without respect to sex 
or age. Hence, sir, the purport of the information you 



4 



42 PliOTEST or THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 

have communicated to Congress, and to the world, is, that 
there are American citizens who, in violation of the dic- 
tates of humanity and religion, have engaged in unconsti- 
tutional and wicked attempts to circulate, through the 
mails, inflammatory appeals, addressed to the passions of 
the slaves, and which appeals, as is implied in the object 
of your proposed law, are intended to stimulate the slaves to 
indiscriminate massacre. Recent events irresistibly con- 
fine the application of your remarks to the officers and 
members of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its 
auxiliaries. 

On the 2Sth of March, 1834, the Senate of the United 
States passed the following resolution : 

'Resolved, That the President, in relation to the pub- 
lic revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and pow- 
er not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in der- 
rogation of both.' 

On the 5th of the ensuing month, you transmitted to 
that body your * solemn protest' against their decision. 
Instructed by your example, we now, sir, in behalf of the 
Society, of which we are the constituted organs, and in 
behalf of all who are associated with it, present to you 
this, our ^ solemn protest' against your grievous and un- 
founded accusations. 

Should it be supposed, that in thus addressing you, we 
are wannng in the respect due to your exalted station, 
we offer, ih our vindication, your own acknov/ledgment to 
the Senate : ' Subject only to the restraints of truth and 
justice, the free people of the United States have the un- 
doubted right as inditiduals, or collectively, orally, or in 
writing, at such times and in such language and form as 
they may think proper, to discuss his (the President's) 
official conduct, and to express and promulgate their 
opinions concerning it.' 



PROTEST OP THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 43 

In the exercise of this * undoubted right,' we protest 
against the judgment you have pronounced against the 
abolitionists. 

First. Because, in rendering that judgment ofTiciallyj 
you assumed a power not belonging to your office. 

You complained, that the resolution censuring your con- 
duct, ' though adopted by the Senate in its legislative ca- 
pacity, is, in its effect, and in its characteristics, essenti- 
ally judicial.'' And thus, sir, although the charges of 
which we complain were made by you, in your executive 
capacity, they are, equally v.ith the resolution, essentially 
judicial. The Senate adjudged that your conduct was un- 
constitutional. You pass the same judgment on our 
efforts. Nay, sir, you go farther than the Senate. That 
body forbore to impeach your motives — but you have as- 
sumed the prerogatives, not only of a court of law, but of 
conscience — and pronounce our efforts to be wicked as 
well as unconstitutional. 

Secondly. We protest against the puhliciiy you have 
given to your accusations. 

You felt it to be a grievance, that the charge against 
you was ' spread upon the Journal of the Senate, publish- 
ed to the nation and to the world — made part of our 
enduring archives, and incorporated in the history of the 
age. The punishment of removal from office, and future 
disqualification, does not follow the decision ; but the 7nor- 
al influence of a solemn declaration by a majority of the 
Senate, that the accused is guilty of the offence charged 
upon him, has been as effectually secured as if the like 
declaration had been made upon an impeachment express- 
ed in the same terms.' 

And is it nothing, sir, that we are officially charged by 
the President of the United States, with wicked and un- 
constitutional efforts, and with harboring the most execra- 



44 PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 

ble intentions ; and, this too, in a document spread upon 
the Journals of both Houses of Congress, published to the 
nation and to the world, made part of our enduring ar- 
chives, and incorporated in the history of the age? It is 
true, that although you have given judgment against us, 
you cannot award execution. We are not, indeed, sub- 
jected to the penalty of murder ; but need we ask you, 
sir, what must be the moral influence of your declaration, 
that we have intended its perpetration 1 

Thirdly. We protest against your condemnation of 
us unheard. 

What, sir, was your complaint against the Senate? 
* Without notice, unheard, and untried, I find myself 
charged, on the records of the Senate, and in a form un- 
known in our country, with the high crime of violating 
the laws and Constitution of my country. No notice of 
the charge was given to the accused, and no opportunity 
afforded him to respond to the accusation — to meet his 
accusers face to face — to cross-examine the witnesses — to 
procure counteracting testimony, or to be heard in his de- 
fence.' 

Had you, sir, done to others, as it thus seems you would 
that others should do to you, no occasion would have been 
given for this protest. You most truly assert, in relation 
to the conduct of the Senate, ' It is the policy of our be- 
nign system of jurisprudence, to secure in all criminal 
proceedings, and even in the most trivial litigations, a fair, 
unprejudiced, and impartial trial.' And by what author- 
ity, sir, do you ejxpect such of your fellow-citizens as are 
known as abolitionists, from the benefit of this benign sys- 
tem'? When has a fair, unprejudiced, and impartial trial 
been accorded to those who dare to maintain that all men 
are equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness 1 What was the trial, sir, which preceded the 
judgment you have rendered against them ? 



PROTEST OF THE A3IERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 4»> 

Fourilily. We protest against the vagueness of your 
charges. 

We cannot more forcibly describe the injustice you 
have done us, tlian by adopting your own indignant re- 
monstrance, against what you deemed similar injustice on 
the part of the Senate, ' Some of the first principles of 
natural right and enlightened jurisprudence, have been 
violated in the very form of the resolution. It carefully 
abstains from averring in which of the late proceedings the 
President has assumed upon himself authority and power 
not conferred by the Constitution and laws. Why was 
not the certainty of the offence, the nature and cause of 
the accusation, set out in the manner required in the 
Constitution, before even the humblest individual, for 
the smallest crime, can be exposed to condemnation ? 
Such a specification was due to the accused, that he might 
direct his defence to the real points of attack. A more 
striking illustration of the soundness and necessity of the 
rule which forbid vogue and indejinitc generalities, and 
require a reasonable certainty in all judicial allegations, 
and a more glaring instance of the violation of these rules, 
has seldom been exhibited.' 

It has been reserved for you, sir, to exhibit a still more 
striking illustration of the importance of these rules, and 
a still more glaring instance of their violation. You have 
accused an indefinite number of your fellow-citizens, with- 
out designation of name or residence, of making uncon- 
stitutional and wdcked efforts, and of harboring intentions 
which could be entertained only by the most depraved and 
abandoned of mankind ; and yet you carefully abstain from 
averring ichich Article of the Constitution they have trans- 
gressed ; you omit stating when, where, and by whom 
these wicked attempts were made ; you give no specifica- 
tion of the inflammatory appeals, which you assert have 



46 PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 

been addressed to the passions of the slaves. You well 
know that the ' moral ivfiucnce^ of your charges will affect 
thousands and tens of thousands of your countrymen, 
many of them your political friends — some of them here- 
tofore honored with your confidence — most, if not all of 
them, of irreproachable characters ; and yet, by the very 
vagueness of your charges, you incapacitate each one of 
this multitude from proving his innocence. 

Fifthly. We protest against your charges, because 
they are untrue. Surely, sir, the burthen of proof rests 
upon you. If you possess evidence against us, we 
are, by your own showing, entitled to ' an opportunity to 
cross-examine witnesses, to procure counteracting testi- 
mony, and to be heard in [our'\ defence.' You complain- 
ed that you had been denied such an opportunity. It was 
not to have been expected, then, that you would make the 
conduct of the Senate the model of your own. Conscious 
of the wrong done to you, and protesting against it, you 
found yourself compelled to enter on your defence. You 
have placed us in similar circumstances, and we proceed 
to follow your example : 

The substance of your various allegations may be em- 
bodied in the charge, that we have attempted to circulate^ 
through the mails, appeals addressed to the passions of the 
slaves, calculated to stimulate them to insurrection, and with 
the intention of producing a servile ivar. 

It is deserving of notice, that the attempt to circulate 
our papers, is alone charged upon us. It is not pretended 
that we have put our appeals into the hands of a single 
slave, or that, in any instance, our endeavors to excite a 
servile war have been crowned with success. And in what 
way was our most execrable attempts made? By secret 
agents, traversing the slave country in disguise, stealing 
by night into the hut of the slave, and there reading to 



PROTEST OP THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 47 

him our inflammatory appeals? You, sir, answer this 
question by declaring, that we attempted the mighty mis- 
chief by circulating our appeals ' through the mails ! ' 
And are the Southern slaves, sir, accustomed to receive 
periodicals by mail? Of the thousands of publications 
mailed from the Anti-Slavery Office for the South, did you 
ever hear, sir, of one solitary paper being addressed to a 
slave ? Would you know to whom they were directed, 
consult the Southern newspapers, and you would find them 
complaining that they were sent to public officers, clergy- 
men, and other influential citizens. Thus it seems we 
are incendiaries, who place the torch in the hands of him 
whose dwellings we would fire ! We are conspiring to 
excite a servile war, and announce our design to the mas- 
ters, and commit to their care and disposal the very instru- 
ments by which we expect to effect our purpose ! It has 
been said that thirty or forty of our papers were received 
at the South, directed to free people of color. We cannot 
deny the assertion, because these papers may have been 
mailed by others, for the sinister purpose of charging the 
act upon us. We are, however, ready to make our sever- 
al affidavits, that not one paper, with our knowledge, or 
by our authority, has ever been sent to any person in a 
slave state. The free people of color at the South can ex- 
ert no influence in behalf of the enslaved; and we have 
no disposition to excite odium against them, by making 
them the recipients of our publications. 

Your proposal that a law should be passed, punishing 
the circulation, through the mails, of papers intended to ex- 
cite the slaves to insurrection, necessarily implies that such 
papers are now circulated; and you expressly and posi- 
tively assert, that we have attempted to circulate appeals 
addressed to the passions of the slaves, and calculated to 
produce all the horrors of a servile war. We trust, sir, 



4S PROTEST OF THT^. AMERICAN A, S. SOCIETY. 

your proposed law, so portentous to the freedom of the 
press, will not be enacted, till you have furnished Congress 
with stronger evidence of its necessity than unsupported 
assertions. We hope you will lay before that body, for its 
information, the papers to which you refer. This is the 
more necessary, as the various public journals and meet- 
sno-s which have denounced us for entertaining^ insurrec- 
tionary and murderous designs, have in no instance been 
able to quote from our publications, a single exortation to 
the slaves to break their fetters, or the expression of a soli- 
tary wish for a servile war. 

How far our writings are ' calculated' to produce insur- 
rection, is a question which will be variously decided ac- 
cording to the latitude in which it is discussed. When we 
recollect that the humble school book, the tale of fiction, 
and the costly annual, have been placed under the ban of 
Southern editors for trivial allusions to slavery — and that 
a Southern divine has warned his fellow-citizens of the 
danger of permitting slaves to be present at the celebration 
of our national festival, where they might listen to the Dec- 
laration of Independence, and to eulogiums on liberty — 
we have little hope that our disquisitions on human rights 
will be generally deemed safe and innocent, where those 
rights are habitually violated. Certain writings of one of 
your predecessors. President Jefferson, would undoubtedly 
be regarded, in some places, so insurrectionary as to ex- 
pose to popular violence whoever should presume to circu- 
late them. 

As therefore, sir, there is no common standard by which 
the criminality of opinions respecting slavery can be 
tested, we acknowledge the foresight Vv^hich prompted you 
to recommend, that the * severe penalties' of your propos- 
ed law should be awarded, not according to the character 
of the publication, but the intention of the writer. Still, 



PROTEST or THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 41) 

sir, we apprehend that no trivial difficulties will be experi- 
enced in the application of your law. The writer may be 
anonymous, or beyond the reach of prosecution, while the 
porter who deposites the papers in the Post Office, and the 
mail carrier who transports them, having no evil intentio,ns, 
cannot be visited with the 'severe penalties;' and thus 
will your law fail in securing to the South that entire ex- 
emption from all discussions on the subject of slaverv, 
which it so vehemently desires. The success of the at- 
tempt already made to establish a censorship of the press, 
is not such as to invite farther encroachment on therinht 
of the people to publish their sentiments. 

In your protest, you remarked to the Senate, 'The 
whole executive power being vested in the President, who 
is responsible for its exercise, it is a necessary consequence 
that he should hive a right to employ agents of his owji 
choice, to aid him in the performance of liis duties, and to 
discharge them when he is no longer ivilling io be kespox- 
siBLE for their acts. He is equally bound to take care 
that the laws be faithfully executed, whether they impose 
duties on the liighest officer of State, or the lowest subor- 
dinate in any of the departments.' 

It may not be uninteresting to you, sir, to be informed 
in what manner your ' Subordinate ' in New York, who, 
on your ' responsibility ' is exercising the functions of Cen- 
sor of the American press, discharges the arduous duties 
of this untried, and until now, unheard of office. We 
beg leave to assure you, that his task is executed with a 
simplicity of principle, and celerity of despatch, unknown 
to any Censor of the press in France or Austria. Your 
subordinate decides upon the incendiary character of the 
publications committed to the Post Office, by a glance at 
the wrappers or bags in which they are contained. Na 
5 



oO PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 

packages sent to be mailed from our office, and directed 
to a slave state, can escape the vigilance of this inspector 
of canvass and brown paper. Even your own protest, sir, 
if in an anti-slavery envelope, would be arrested on its 
progress to the south, as ' inflammatory, incendiary and 
insurrectionary in the highest degree.' 

No veto, however, is as yet, imposed on the circulation 
of publications from any printing office but our own. — 
Hence, when we desire to send ' appeals ' to the south, all 
that is necessary is, to insert them in some newspaper that 
espouses our principles, pay for as many thousand copies 
as we think proper, and order them to be mailed accord- 
ing to our instructions. 

Such, sir, is the worthless protection purchased for the 
south, by the most unblushing and dangerous usurpation 
of which any public officer has been guilty since the or- 
ganization of our federal government. Were the Senate, 
in reference to your acknowledged responsibility for the 
conduct of your subordinates, to resolve ' that the Presi- 
dent in relation to the suppression of certain papers in the 
New York Post Office, has assum.ed upon himself author- 
ity and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, 
but in derogation of both ; ' instead of protesting against 
the charge, you would be compelled to acknowledge its 
truth, and you would plead the necessity of the case in 
your vindication. The weight to be attached to such a 
plea, may be learned from the absurdity and inefficacy of 
the New York Censorship. Be assured, sir, your propos- 
ed law to punish the intentions of an author, will in its 
practical operations, prove equally impotent. 

And now, sir, permit us respectfully to suggest to you, 
the propriety of ascertaining the real designs of abolition- 
ists, before your apprehensions of them, lead you to sanc- 
tion any more trifling with the liberty of the press.— 



PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 51 

You assume it as a fact, that abolitionists are miscreants, 
who are laboring to effect the massacre of their southern 
brethren. Are you aware of the extent of the reproach, 
which such an assumption casts upon the character of 
your countrymen? In August last, the number of Anti- 
Slavery Societies known to us, was 263 ; we have noic the 
names of more than 350 Societies, and accessions are 
daily made to the multitude wlio embrace our principles. 
And can you think it possible, sir, that these citizens are 
deliberately plotting murder, and furnishing us with funds 
to send publications to the south ' intended to instigate the 
slaves to insurrection ? ' Is there any thing in the charac- 
ter and manners of the free states, to warrant the imputa- 
tion on their citizens of such enormous wickedness? — 
Have you ever heard, sir, of whole communities in these 
states, subjecting obnoxious individuals to a mock trial, 
and then in contempt of law, humanity and religion, de- 
liberately murdering them? You have seen in the public 
journals, great rewards offered for the perpetration of hor- 
rible crimes. We appeal to your candor and ask. Were 
these rewards offered by abolitionists, or by men whose 
charges against abolitionists, you have condescended to 
sanction and disseminate ? 

And what, sir, is the character of those whom you have 
in your message held up to the execration of the civilized 
world? Their enemies being judges, they are rdigious 
fanatics. And what are the haunts of these plotters of 
murder ? The pulpit, the bench, the bar, the professor's 
chair, the hall of legislation, the meeting for prayer, the 
temple of the Most High. But strange and monstrous as 
is this conspiracy, still you believe in its existence, and call 
on Congress to counteract it. Be persuaded, sir, the moral 
sense of the community is abundantly sufficient to render 
this conspiracy utterly impotent, the moment its machina- 



52 PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY. 

tions are exposed. Only PROVE the assertions and in- 
sinuations in your message, and you dissolve in an instant 
every Anti-Slavery Society in our land. Think not, sir, 
that we shall interpose any obstacle to an inquiry into our 
conduct. We invite, nay, sir, we entreat the appointment 
by Congress of a committee of investigation, to visit the 
Anti-Slavery OfRce in New York. They shall be put in 
possession of copies of all the publications that have issued 
from our press. Our whole correspondence shall be sub- 
mitted to their inspection ; our accounts of receipts and 
expenditures shall be spread before them, and we ourselves 
Villi cheerfully answer under oath whatever interrogatories 
ihey may put to us relating to the charges you have ad- 
vanced. 

Should such a committee be denied, and should the law 
you propose, stigmatizing us as felons, be passed without 
inquiry into the truth of your accusation, and without al- 
lowing us a hearing, then shall we make the language of 
your protest our own, and declare that, ' If such proceed- 
ings shall be approved and sustained by an intelligent peo- 
ple, then will the great contest with arbitrary power which 
had established in statutes, in bills of rights, in sacred 
charters, and in constitutions of government, the right of 
every citizen to a notice before trial, to a hearing before 
condemnation, and to an impartial tribunal for deciding 
on the charge, have been made in VAIN.' 

Before we conclude, permit us, sir, to offer you the fol- 
lowing assurances. 

Our principles, our objects, and our measures, are wholly 
uncontaminated by considerations of party policy. What- 
ever may be our respective opinions as citizens, of mea 
and measures, as abolitionists we have expressed no politi- 
cal preferences, and are pursuing no party ends. From 
neither of the gentlemen nominated to succeed you, have 



PROTEST OF THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETT. 53 

we any thing to hope or fear ; and to neither of them do 
we intend, as abolitionists, to afford any aid or influence. 
This declaration will, it is hoped, satisfy the partizans of 
the rival candidates, that it is not necessary for them to 
assail our rights, by way of convincing the south that they 
do not possess our favor. 

We have addressed you, sir, on this occasion, with re- 
publican plainness, and Christian sincerity ; but with no 
desire to derogate from the respect that is due to you, or 
wantonly to give you pain. To repel your charges, and 
to disabuse the public, was a duty we owed to ourselves, 
to our children, and above all, to the great and holy cause 
in which we are engaged. That cause we believe is ap- 
proved by our Maker ; and while we retain this belief, it 
is our intention, trusting to His direction and protection, 
to persevere in our endeavors to impress upon the minds 
and hearts of our countrymen the sinfulness of claiming 
property in human beings, and the duty and wisdom of 
immediately relinquishing it. 

When convinced that our endeavors are wrong, we shall 
abandon them, but such conviction must be produced by 
other arguments than vituperation, popular violence, or 
penal enactments, 

ARTHUR TAPPAN, 
WILLIAM JAY, 
JOHN RANKIN, 
ABRAHAM L. COX, 
JOSHUA LEAVITT, 
SIMEON S. JOCELYN, 
LEWIS TAPPAN, 
THEODORE S. WRIGHT, 
SAMUEL E. CORNISH, 
ELIZUR WRIGHT, Jr., 

Executive Committee, 
New York, Dec. 26, 1835. 
5* 



a- 



yjx^t 



\ja ,\ .AyX,A.tAAJ 



TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, 

OR, TO SUCH AMERICANS AS VALUE THEIR RIGHTS, AND 
DARE TO MAINTAIN THEM, 

J^ellow Countrymen : — 

A crisis has arrived, in which rights the most important 
which civil society can acknowledge, and which have been 
acknowledged by our Constitution and laws, in terms the 
most explicit which language can afford, are set at naught 
by men whom your favor has invested with a brief authori- 
ty. By what st'dudard is your liberty of conscience, of 
speech, and of the press, now measured? Is it by those 
glorious charters you have inherited from your fathers, and 
which your present rulers have called Heaven to witness, 
they would preserve inviolate"! Alas! another standard 
has been devised, nnd if we would know what rights are 
conceded to us by our own servants, we must consult the 
COMPACT by which the South engages on certain condi- 
tions to give its trade and voles to northern men. All 
ricrhts not allowed by this compact, we now hold by suffer- 
ance, and our Governors and Legislatures avow their read- 
iness to deprive us of them, whenever in their opinion, leg- 
islation on the subject shall be ' necessary.' * This com- 
pact is not indeed published to the world, under the hands 
and seals of the contracting parties, but it is set forth in 



*See the Messages of the Governors of New York and Connecncut, the 
reaohitions of tliR iN'ew Yi)rk Legislature, and the bill iutroduced ialo the 
Legislature of Khode Island. 



TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 55 

official messages, — in resolutions of the State and Nation- 
al Legislatures— in the proceedings of popular meetincrs 
and in acts of lawless violence. The temples of the Al- 
mighty Iiave been sacked, because the worshippers did not 
conform their consciences to the compact.* Ministers of 
the gospel have been dragged as criminals from the altar 
to the bar, because they taught the people, from the Bible, 
doctrines proscribed by the compact.! Hundreds of^ free 
citizens peaceably assembled to express their sentiments, 
have, because such an expression was forbidden by the 
compact, been forcibly dispersed, and the chief actor in 
this invasion on the freedom of speech, instead of beino- 
punished for a breach of the peace, was rewarded for his 
fidelity to the compact, with an office of high trust and 
honor. f 

'The freedom of the press — the palladium of liberty,' 
was once a household proverb. Now, a printing office§ is 
entered by ruffians, and its types scattered in the highway, 
because disobedient to the compact. A Grand Jury, 
sworn to ' present all things truly as they come to their 
knoNvledge,' refuse to indict the offenders; and a Senator 
in Conoress rises in his place, and appeals to tlie outrage 
in the printing office, and the conduct of the Grand Jury 
as evidence of the good faith with which the people of the 
State of New York were resolved toobserve the compact.|j 

The Executive Magistrate of the American Union, un- 
mindful of his obligation to execute the laws for the equal 
benefit of his fellow citizens, has sanctioned a censorship 



* Churches in New York attacked by a mob in 1834. 
tSee two cases within the last twelve months in New Hampshire. 
4: Samuel Beanlsley, Esq., the leader of the Utioa riot, was shortly after- 
wards appointed Attorney General of the State of New York. 
5 Office of the Utica Standard and Democrat newspaper. 
11 See speech of the Hon. Silas Wright in the U. S. Senate of Feb. last. 



56 TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 

of the press, by which papers incompatible with the com- 
pact are excluded from the southern mails, and he has offi- 
cially advised Congress to do by law, although in violation 
of the Constitution, what he had himself virtually done al- 
ready in despite of both. The invitation has indeed been 
rejected, but by the Senate of the United States only, after 
a portentous struggle — a struggle which distinctly exhibit- 
ed the political conditions of the compact, as well as the 
fidelity with which those conditions are observed by a 
northern candidate for the Presidency. While in compli- 
ance with these conditions, a powerful minority in the Sen- 
ate were forging fetters for the Press, the House of Rep- 
resentatives were employed in breaking down the right of 
Petition. On the 26th May last, the following resolution, 
reported by a committee, was adopted by the House, viz : 

' Resolved, That all Petitions, Memorials, Resolutions 
and Propositions relating in any way, or to any extent 
whatever to the subject of Slavery, shall, without being 
either printed or referred, be laid on the table, and that no 
farther action whatever shall be had thereon.' Ayes, 117. 
Nays, Cy. 

Bear with us, fellow countrymen, while we call your at- 
tention to the outrage on your rights, the contempt of per- 
sonal obligations and the hardened cruelty involved in this 
detestable resolution. Condemn us not for the harshness 
of our language, before you hear our justification. We 
shall speak only the truth, but we shall speak it as free- 
men. 

The right of petition is founded in the very institution 
of civil government, and has from time immemorial been 
acknowledged as am.ong the unquestionable privileges of 
our English ancestors. This right springs from the great 
truth that government is established for the benefit of the 
governed, and it forms the medium by which the People 



TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 57 

acquaint their rulers with their wants and their grievances. 
So accustomed were the Americans to the exercise of this 
right, even during their subjection to the British Crown, 
that, on the formation of the Federal Constitution, the Con- 
vention not conceiving that it could be endangered, made 
no provision for its security. But in the first Congress 
that assembled under the new Government, the omission 
was repaired. It was thought some case might possibly 
occur, in which this right might prove troublesome to a 
dominant faction, who would endeavor to stifle it. An 
amendment was therefore proposed and adopted, by which 
Congress is restrained from making any law abridging 
* the right of the people, peaceably to assemble, and to pe- 
tition the Government for a redress of grievances.' Had 
it not been for this prudent jealousy of our Fathers, instead 
of the resolution I have transcribed, we should have had a 
LAW, visiting with pains and penalties, all who dared to 
petition the Federal Government, in behalf of the victims 
of oppression, held in bondage by its authority. The pre- 
sent resolution cannot indeed consign such petitions to the 
prison or the scaffold, but it makes the right to petition a 
congressional boon, to be granted or withheld at pleasure, 
and in the present case effectually withholds it, by render- 
ing it nugatory. 

Petitions are to inform the Government of the wishes of 
the People, and by calling forth the action of the Legisla- 
ture, to inform the constituents how far their wishes are 
respected by their representatives. The information thus 
mutually given and received is essential to a faithful and 
enlightened exercise of the right of legislation on the one 
hand, and of suffrage on the other. But the resolution we 
are considering, provides that no petition in relation to 
slavery, shall be printed for the information of the mem- 
bers, nor referred to a committee to ascertain the truth of 



58 TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 

its statements; nor slial! any vote be taken, in regard to it, 
by which the people may learn the sentiments of their re- 
presentatives. 

If Congress may thus dispose of petitions on one sub- 
ject, they may make the same disposition of petitions on any 
and every other subject. Our representatives are bound 
by oath, not to pass any law abridging the right of petition, 
but if this resolution is constitutional, they may order eve- 
ry petition to be delivered to their door-keeper, and by him 
be committed to the flames; for why preserve petitions on 
which no action can be had? Had the resolution been di- 
rected to petitions for an object palpably unconstitutional, 
it would still have been without excuse. The construction 
of the Constitution is a matter of opinion, and every citizen 
has a right to express that opinion in a petition, or other- 
wise. 

But tliis usurpation is aggravated by the almost univer- 
sal admission that Congress does possess the constitutional 
power to legislate on the subject of slavery in the District 
of Columbia and the Territories, No wonder that a dis- 
tinguished statesman refused to sanction the right of the 
House to pass such a resolution by even voting against it.* 
The men who perpetrated this outrage had sworn to sup- 
port the Constitution, and will they hereafter plead at the 
bar of their Maker, that they had kept their oath, because 
they had abridged the right of petition by aresoIiftion,and 
not by law ! 

This resolution not only violates the rights of the people, 
but it nullifies the privileges and obligations of their repre- 
sentatives. It is the undoubted right and duty of every 



*Mr. J. Q, Adams, on his name being called, refused to vote, saying, 
« the resolution is in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, 
and the privjleoes of the nieinberti of this House.' 



TO THE PEOPLE OP THE U. STATES. TiO 

member of Congress to propose any measure witliiti tlie 
limits of the Constitution, which he believes is required 
by the interests of his constituents and the welfare of his 
country. Now, mark the base surrender of this right — 
the wicked dereliction of this duty. All ' resolutions and 
propositions ' relating ' in any way or to any extent what- 
ever to the subject of slavery,' shall be laid on the table, 
and ^ no farther action whatever shall be had thereon.' — 
What a spectacle has been presented to the American peo- 
ple ! — 117 members of Congress relinquishing their own 
rights, cancelling their own solemn obligations, forcibly 
depriving the other members of their legislative privileges, 
abolishing the freedom of debate, contemning the right of 
petition, and prohibiting present and future legislation on 
a most important and constitutional subject, by a rule of 
order ! 

In 1825, the New York Legislature instructed the rep- 
resentatives from that state in Congress, to insist on mak- 
intr ' the prohibition of slavery an indispensable condition 
of admission ' of certain territories into the Union. In 
182S, the Legislature of Pennsylvania instructed the Penn- 
sylvania members of Congress, to vote for the abolition of 
slavery in the District of Columbia. In vain, hereafter, 
shall a representative present the instructions of his con- 
stituents, or the injunctions of a sovereign state. No 
question shall be taken, on any motion he may offer, in 
any way or to any extent, relating to slavery ! 

Search the annals of legislation, and you will find no 
precedent for such a profligate act of tyranny, exercised 
by a majority over their fellow legislators, nor for such an 
impudent contempt of the rights of the People. 

But this resolution is no less barbarous than it is profli- 
gate and impudent. Remember, fellow-countrymen ! that 
die decree has gone forth, that there shall be no legislation? 



60 TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 

by Congress, in any way or to any extent whatever, on the 
subject of slavery. Now call to mind, that Congress is the 
local and only legislature of the District of Columbia, 
which is placed by the Constitution under its ' exclusive 
jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever.' In this District, there 
are thousands of human beings divested of the rights of 
humanity, and subjected to a negotiable despotism ; and 
Congress is the only power that can extend the shield of 
law to protect them from cruelty and abuse : and that 
shield, it is now resolved, shall not be extended in any 
way, or to any extent ! But this is not all. The District 
has become the great slave market of North America, and 
the port of Alexandria is the Guinea of our proud repub- 
lic, whence * cargoes of despair ' are contmuaily depart- 
ing.* 

In the city which bears the name of the Father of his 
country, dealers in human flesh receive licences for the 
vile traffic, at 8400 each per annum ; and the gazettes of 
the capital have their columns polluted with the advertise- 
ments of these men, offering cash for children and youth, 
who, torn from their parents and families, are to wear out 
their existence on the plantations of the south. t For the 
safe keeping of these children and youth, till they are 
shipped for the Mississippi, private pens and prisons are 
provided, and the United States' Jail used when re- 
quired. The laws of the District in relation to slaves and 
free negroes, are of the most abominable and iniquitous 
character. Any free citizen with a dark skin, may be 



♦ One dealer, John Armfield, advertises in the National Intelligencer of 
the 10*1) of February la.st, that he has three vessels in the trade, and that 
they will leave the port of Alexandria on the 1st and 15ih of each month. 

■f Twelve hundred negroes are thus advertised for in the National Intelli- 
gencer of the 28th of iMarch last. The negroes wanted are generally from 
the age of 10 or YZ years to 25, and of both sexes. 



TO THE PEOPLE OE THE U. STATES. Qi 

arrested on pretence of being a fugitive slave, and com- 
mitted to the United States' Prison^ and unless within 
a certain number of days he proves his freedom, while im- 
mured within its walls, he is, under authority of Congress, 
sold as a slave for life. Do you ask why ? Let the blood 
mantle in your cheeks, while we give you the answer of 
the LAW — ' to pay his jail fees ' ! ! 

On the llth of January, 18-27, the Committee for ths 
District of Columbia, (themselves slaveholders) introduc- 
ed a bill providincr that the jail fees should hereafter be a 
county charge. The bill did not pass : and by the late 
resolution, a statute unparalleled for injustice aiid atrocity 
by any mandate of European despotism, is to be like the 
law of the Medes and Persians, that altereth not, since no 
proposition for its repeal or modification can be enter- 
tained. 

The Grand Jury of Alexandria presented the slave-trade 
of that place, as ' disgraceful to our character as citizens 
of a free government,' and as * a grievance demanding 
legislative redress; ' that is, the interposition of Congress 
— but 117 men have decided that there shall be * no action 
whatever ' by Conc^ress in relation to slavery. 

In March, ]S16,Jolui Randolph submitted the following 
resolution to the House of P^epresentatives : ' Resolved, 
That a committee be appointed to inquire into the exis- 
tence of an inhuman and illegal traffic of slaves, carried 
on in and through the District of Columbia, and to report 
whether any, and what measures are necessary for putting 
a stop to the same.' The compact had not then been 
formed, and the resolution was adopted. Such a resolu- 
tion would naid ' be laid on the table/ and treated with 
silent contempt. 

In 1828, eleven hundred inhabitants of the District pre^ 
sentcd a petition to Congress, complaining of the * Do- 
6 



€Q TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 

MESTic Slave Trade ' as a grievance disgraceful in its 
character, and * even more demoralizing in its influence,' 
than the foreign traffic. The petition concluded as fol- 
lows : ' The people of this District have within themselves 
110 means of legislative redress, and we therefore appeal 
to your Honorable body as the only one vested by the 
American Constitution with power to relieve us.' No 
more shall such appeals be made to the national council. 
What matters it, that the people of the District are annoy- 
ed by the human shambles opened among them ? What 
matters it, that Congress is ' the only body vested by the 
American Constitution with power to relieve ' them? — 
The compact requires that no action shall be had on ani/ 
petition relating to slavery. 

The horse or the ox may be protected in the District, 
by act of Congress, from the cruelty of its owner ; but 
MAN, created in the image of God, shall, if his complexion 
be dark, be abandoned to every outrage. The negro may 
be bound alive to the stake in front of the capitol, as well 
as in the streets of St. Louis — his shrieks may resound 
through the representative hall — and the stench of his burn- 
ing body may enter the nostrils of the law-givers — but no 
vote may rebuke the abomination — no law forbid its rep- 
etition. 

The representatives of the nation may regulate the 
traffic in sheep and swine, within the ten miles square; 
but the SLAVERS of the District may be laden to suffijcation 
with human cattle — -the horrors of the middle passage may 
be transcended at the wharves of Alexandria : but Con- 
gress may not limit the size of the cargoes, or provide for 
the due feeding and watering the animals composing them ! 
The District of Columbia is henceforth to be the only spot 
on the face of the globe, subjected to a civilized and chris- 
tian police, in which avariae and malice may, with legal 



TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. (>3 

impunity inflict on humanity whatever sufferings ingenuity 
can devise, or depravity desire. 

The flagitiousness of this resolution is aggravated if 
possible by the arbitrary means by which its adoption was 
secured. No representative of the People was permitted 
to lift up his voice against it — to plead the commands of 
the Constitution which it violated — his own privileges and 
duties which it contemned — the rights of his constituents 
on which it trampled — the claims of justice and humanity 
which it impiously outraged. Its advocates were afraid 
and ashamed to discuss it, and forbidding debate, they per- 
petrated in silence the most atrocious act that has ever 
disgraced an American Legislature.* 

And was no reason whatever, it may be asked, assigned 
for this bold invasion of our rights, this insult to the sym- 
pathies of our common nature ? Yes — connected with 
the resolution was a preamble explaining its object. Read 
it, fellow countrymen, and be equally astonished at the 
impudence of your rulers in avowing such an object, and 
at their folly in adopting such an expedient to effect it. 
The lips of a free people are to be sealed by insult and 
injury ! 

' Whereas, it is extremely important and desirable that 
the AGITATION on this subject should be finally arrested, 
for the purpose of restoring trajiquillity to the public mind, 
your committee respectfully recommend the following res- 
olution.' 

Order reigns in Warsmc, were the terms in which the 
tiiumph of Russia over the liberties of Poland was an- 



* A debate was allowed on a motion to re-conimil the repoit, for tlie 
purpose of preparing a resolution iliai Congress lias no constiiuiional pow- 
er to interfere with slavery in ilie District of Cohi^ibia ; but when tjie 
sense of the House is to be taken on the resolution reported by the cojn- 
millee, all debate was prevented by the previous question. 



64 TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 

Hounced to the world. When the right of petition shall 
be broken down — when no whisper shall be heard in Con- 
gress in behalf of human rights — when the press shall be 
muzzled, and the freedom of speech destroyed by gag- 
laws, then will the slaveholders announce, that tranquillity 
is restored to the public mind. 

Fellow countrymen ! is such the tranquillity you desire 
— is such the heritage you would leave to your children ? 
Suffer not the present outrage, by eflecting its avowed ob- 
ject, to invite farther aggressions on your rights. The 
chairman on the committee boasted that the number of 
petitioners the present session, for the abolition of slavery 
in the District, was only 34,000 1 Let us resolve, we be- 
seech you, that at the next session the number shall 
be A MILLION. Perhaps our 117 representatives will 
then abandon in despair their present dangerous and 
unconstitutional expedient for tranquillizing the public 
mind. 

The purpose of this address is not to urge upon you our 
own views of the selfishness of slavery, and the safety of 
its immediate abolition ; but to call your attention to the 
conduct of your rulers. Let no one think for a moment, 
that because he is not an abolitionist, his liberties are not, 
and will not be invaded. We have no rights distinct from 
the rights of the people. Calumny, falsehood, and popu- 
lar violence, have been employed in vain, to tranquillize 
abolitionists. It is now proposed to soothe them, by de- 
spoiling them of their constitutional rights ; but they can- 
not be despoiled alone. The right of petition and the 
fre€dom of debate are as sacred and valuable to those who 
dissent from our opinions, as they are to ourselves. Can 
the Constitution at the same time secure liberty to you, 
and expose us to oppression — give you freedom of speech, 



TO THE PEOPLE OF THE U. STATES. 65 

and lock our lips — respect your right of petition, and treat 
ours with contempt ? No, fellow countrymen ! we must 
be all free, or all slaves together. We implore you, then, 
by all the obligations of interest, of patriotism, and of re- 
ligion — by the remembrance of your fathers — by your love 
for your children, to unite with us in maintaining our 
common, and till lately, our unquestioned political 
rights. 

We ask you as men to insist that your servants, acting 
jft the local legislators of the District of Columbia, shall 
respect the common rights and decencies of humanity. 
We ask you as freemen, not to permit your constitutional 
privileges to be trifled with, by those who have sworn to 
maintain them. We ask you as Christian men, to remem- 
ber that by sanctioning the sinful acts of your agents, you 
yourselves assume their guilt. 

We have no candidate to recommend to your favor — 
we ask not your support for any political party ; but we 
do ask you to give your suffrages hereafter only to such 
men as you have reason to believe will not sacrifice your 
rights, and their own obligations, and the claims of mercy 
and the commands of God, to an iniquitous and mercena- 
ry COMPACT. If v/e cannot have northern Presidents and 
other officers of the general government, except in ex- 
change for freedom of conscience, of speech, of the press, 
and of legislation, then let all the appointments at Wash- 
ington be given to the South. If slaveholders will not 
trade with us, unless we consent to be slaves ourselves, 
then let us leave their money, and their sugar, and their 
cotton, to perish with them. 

Fellow countrymen ! we wish, we recommend no action 
whatever, inconsistent with the laws and constitutions of 
our country, or the precepts of our common religion, but: 
6* 



66 TO THE PEOPLE OP THE U. STATES, 

we beseech you to join with us in resolving, that while we 
will respect the rights of others, we will at every hazard 
maintain our own. 

In behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society. 

ARTHUR TAPPAN, 
WILLIAM JAY, 
JOHN RANKIN, 
LEWIS TAPPAN, 
SIMEON S. JOCELYN, 
SAMUEL E. CORNISH, 
JOSHUA LEAVITT, 
ABRAHAxM L. COX, 
AMOS A PHELPS, 
LA ROY SUNDERLAND, 
THEODORE S. WRIGHT, 
ELIZUR WRIGHT, Jr., 

Executive Committee. 
New York, June, 1836. 



LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 
OF THE N. YORK ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. 

After we had read the following very eloquent epistle, 
we could not help thinking of that choice proverb of the 
wise man — ' A word Etiy spoken, is like apples of gold, in 
pictures of silver.' 

Utica, August 26th, 133(5. 

To the Executive Committee of the 

Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, at CiiicinnatJ. 

Dear and Honored Brethren : — Fellow-laborers in 
the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ; and in the 
cause of his despised and oppressed poor. The shout of 
your ruthless persecutors has fallen upon our ears; and 
amid the pauses of the storm, we have been cheered by 
the calm and firm tones of your own unchanged voice. 
We hasten to mingle our hearts with yours; to sing, with 
you, of mercy and of judgment; the mercy that has 
unmasked a nation's enemies, and shielded your heads,, 
and guarded your precious lives, when the floods of un- 
godly men rose up against you : — the justice that has vis- 
ited upon an oppressive and callous nation, a heavy blow 
upon her own boasted, but despised liberties. 

We know we need not occupy our time or yours with 
lengthened exhortations to courage and patience under 
your own sufferings. We know you will not think i^t 
strange concerning the fiery trial that is to try you, as 



68 TO THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE 

though some strange thing had happened unto you. It was 
in no mere worldly enterprize — it was in no scheme of 
partizan ambition — it was in no partnership with those who 
seek their own things and not the things of Jesus Christ 
and his suffering members, that you banded yourselves to- 
gether. Of your plundered property — of your own invad- 
ed domicils — of your own insulted persons — of your own 
endangered lives — of your own outraged rights — of your 
own accumulated wrongs — we are persuaded that you have 
comparatively- thought little. Of these topics we shall, 
accordingly, say little, in tendering to you our condolence 
and our sympathies. 

We mourn, rather^ with you, the infatuation of those, 
who are aiming, through your vitals, a death-blow to their 
own, their children's, and their country's freedom. We 
mourn, with you, the affecting indications, in the midst of 
us, of that blindness of mind, and that hardness of heart, 
which constitute the most fearful presages of a nation's 
downfall. We mourn, with you, the deep wound inflicted, 
in the house of his professed friends, upon the cause of our 
common Saviour. We mourn, with you, that those who 
profess to be his disciples, and claim to be the ministers of 
his truth, should not only * stand aloof from the * cause of 
the poor and needy,' should not only count it obedience to 
Jesus Christ to disregard and despise his little ones, should 
not only forget that ' inasmuch as they relieve not and suc- 
cor not the least of these his brethren, they do it not unto 
him' — but, as though these negligences, for which the 
great Judge has seen fit to pronounce his anticipated sen- 
tence of condemnation, were not sufficient for them — as 
though the quiet acceptancy of the scorner's seat, the 
menial drudgery of wresting the Scriptures to the support^ 
oS impurity and heathenism, of robbery and crime, could 
not suffice to satisfy their greediness — should now think 



OHIO ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. 69 

they do God service, when, in defiance of all human and 
divine laws, combine with the sons of violence, to inflict 
injuries and outrage upon those who presume to ' show the 
house of Jacob their sins, and remember them that are in 
bonds as bound with them.' 

For things like these, dear brethren, v/ith you, we mourn. 
Nor can we cease to sigh and cry while such abomina- 
tions are committed in our land. Yet, while we thus 
grieve, let us remember that we are permitted to rejoice in 
the all-pervading and overruling Providence ofthem whose 
power can bring light out of darkness, and good out of 
evil. He stilleth the tumult of the sea, and the raging of 
the people. The wrath of man shall praise him, and the 
remainder he will restrain. Why do the heathen rage and 
the people imagine a vain thing ? The kings of the earth 
set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, 
against the Lord and his anointed, saying, let us break 
their bands asunder, and cast away their chords from us t 
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh ; the Lord shall 
have them in derision. His king is on his holy hill of 
Zion. He has declared the decree. The rolling of his 
chariot is onward. INations may dash themselves, as the 
potter's vessel, under his wheels — but his march is still 
onward, till all his enemies are put under his feet. 

In the certainty of His reign, and in the glory of His 
triumph, let us rejoice. Yet a little while, and the wicked 
shall not be, but the meek shall inherit the earth, and the 
upright shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. 

Let us pause, and ponder, for a moment, the delightful 
results which, under the good Providence of God, and in 
accordance with the known and established laws of moral 
cause and effect, in his moral government, may yet spring 
from the painful scenes you are now called to witness, and 
through which you are now called to pass. Let us inquire 



70 TO THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE 

diligently whetlier these results may not include some 
germ of promise for our guilty but beloved country — 
whether, along with the sure prospect of ' deliverance to 
the Captive,' (which the recorded oath and veracity of a 
God has already rendered secure,) there can be not a bow 
of hope for an oppressive but repentant nation? 

If it be the purpose of God to save our nation from de- 
struction, we well know that it must be rn a way of na* 
tional penitence and amendment. If the churches in our 
land, are to escape total apostacy and extinction, we know 
they must repent, and bring forth fruit meet for repentance. 
But what hope was there of a cure, so long as the deadly 
malady was preying upon her vitals, unrevealed ? Or 
what instrumentality could be better adapted to arouse a 
sluml)ering people, and convict a self-righteous church, 
than the a^^tounding and painful developements in your 
city, within a few weeks, and a few days past? 

If the people of Ohio and of the Union, are not already 
past feeling and past hope, if the last vestige of political 
foresight as well as moral discernment has not ceased from 
among them— they must now see what it has hitherto been 
so difficult to show them — that there is no possible alterna- 
tive between the enfranchisement of the slave and subju- 
gation of xhefree — that the common Father of all men 
never intended the liberties of a portion of his equal chil- 
dren should long be preserved, while they neglected to 
claim the equal liberties of their brethren ; that the move- 
ments of his providence render such an arrangement im- 
possible — that the changeless constitution of human na- 
ture, renders the very supposition an absurdity ! The 
voice of the slaveholders, through their associates in your 
city, lias abundantly proclaimed that slavery canvot stand, 
except it be upon the ruins of the free press. And with 
equal distinctness and solemnity, has the voice of the non- 



OHIO ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. 71 

slaveholding aristocracy been heard to decree, that the 
free press of the non-slaveholding states must fall ! At 
their bidding, nay, with the violence of their hands the 
free press has fallen ! The press that re?nains, has regis- 
tered its own confession that it is not free, and DARES 
NOT ' ADVENTURE an opinion ' amidst ' the actors ' 
ef that scene.* Yes ! In the face of Europe and of the 
world, it has been recorded that freedom of the press, in 
the commercial metropolis of one of the free states of 
America has already passed away, and is known only in 
the history of the things that have been ; the thinfrs that 
may or may not hereafter, again be ! 

Is there not reason, dear brethren, to hope, that the 
thunder tones of an annunciation like this, may suffice to 
rouse freemen from their slumbers, and freedom from its 
grave 1 

Depend upon it, dear brethren, the spell of apathy and 
the delusion of confiding credulity, on the minds of many, 
many thousands, has been suddenly and irrevocably broken. 
Whatever of scepticism there inai/ have been, a month or 
two aero, in respect to the SETTLED LEAGUE between 
the M'Duffies of the south, and their aristocratic ' breth- 
ren of the north,' to crucify the freedom of the free, in or- 
der to secure the continued slavery of the slave — there will 
nothing of such a scepticism remain among the intelligent 
readers of the passing news now. To the ' imprudent and 
reckless' aristocracy of Cincinnati has been reserved the 
task of certifying, over their own signatures, the truth of 
this oft reiterated, but seemingly incredible charge. Nor 
have they failed to state, in terms too plain to need eluci- 
dation, too explicit to permit evasion, that in the prosecu- 



* Cincinnati Daily Gazette. 



72 TO THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE 

tion of their plans they aim at REVOLUTION ; they 
trample the Constitution under foot, they bid defiance 

to the sovereign people and their laws! The issue is now 
fairly made up. It is understood by all. It is the consti- 
tution, order, law, and liberty for all x\mericans. on the one 
hand : — It is revolution, anarchy, mobocracy, and the sla- 
very of the American people, on the other. There is no 
room for neutrality. There is no possibility of mistake. 
There is no way of escape. There is no middle ground. 
There is no alternative. If the nation is to be saved, it 
must be saved by exertions which nothing but a crisis like 
the present, could have called forth ; by discoveries which 
nothing short of the scenes of Cincinnati could have re- 
vealed. 

Be assured, dear brethren, no occurrences have hitherto 
taken place (not even in our own city, where the violence 
of our enemies has most gloriously strengthened us) so di- 
rectly calculated to convince the hardy yeomanry of cen- 
tral New York, and we may add, of the middle and eastern 
states, that their own interests and liberties are identified 
with those of the slave — that American freedom is no long- 
er a question of geography or of coloj- — that AMERICANS 
MUST BECOME ABOLITIONISTS OR SLAVES, 
as the occurrences of the last few days in Cincinnati indi- 
cate. Previous occurrences had given them reason to sus- 
pect it. Now, they see, they feel, they understand, they 
know it. They have now stood by, while freedom has not 
only been threatened, but prostrated — while the aristocra- 
cy have not only abetted, but consummated the deed, in 
open daylight with their own hands. The husbandman 
has rested upon his scythe— the mechanic has let fall the 
implement of his honest toil, to listen to the story. By 
thousands and scores of thousands will they now come up 



•OHIO ANTI-SLAVERY SOClIiTY. 73 

to the rescue, in whose ears the warning words of aboli- 
tionists have heretofore been an idle tale. 

Permit us to add that the well known cliaracter of the 
press and editor, that in this instance have fallen under 
the prescriptive ban, the universal meed of approbation, 
for candor, courtesy, and kindness, that has been awarded 
them from all parties — from opponents as well as friends, 
enhances in no small degree, the moral force and virtue of 
the demonstration that has now been made. Nothing else 
could so completely have dissipated the illusion hitherto- 
fore floating before the vision of so many well disposed and 
intelligent, but misinformed men, that it must have been 
owing to some undue asperity of manner, some lack of 
sound judgment or discretion, some want of christian pru- 
dence and circumspection, on the part of those who plead 
for the inalienable rights of man, that they have been so 
often and so violently assailed, and that, too, by persons 
professing godliness. Henceforth, the true secret of all 
the ruffian-like commotion that has disturbed the nation 
cannot fail to be understood. It will be traced to its prop- 
er parent — slavery ! It will be seen that there is no mild- 
ness, or gentleness, or wisdom, that can effectually remove 
this monster of iniquity, without rousing all the bitterness 
and rage of the pit. 

Above all — this last act has wound up the drama — it 
has matured the crisis. The half-heeded prophecy of yes- 
terday, has become history. A FREE STATE HAS 
FALLEN BEFOPvE THE JUGGERNAUT OF SLA- 
VERY ! ! ! Ohio is despoiled of her glory ! The star of 
her liberty is trampled in the mire. The Constitution is 
trodden down in her own streets. Her statutes are given 
to the winds. Her citizens hold their possessions, and ex- 
ist, and speak, at the mercy and at the discretion of their 
SELF-MADE DICTATORS'. A crisis like this, must and will 
7 



74 TO THE IXECUTIVfi COMMITTEE OF THB 

be a decisive one. It must prove the grave or the cradfe 
of freedom. Its parallel is not found in the history of our 
republic. The citizens of Ohio will say — and cannot avoid 
saying — whether they will swear fealty to their conquerors, 
or whether they will burst their fetters. On one side or on 
the other of this question, they must sTpe^k. Their silence, 
if they remain silent — icill speak, and speak the requiem 
of their liberties ! But silent they cannot be ! 

You see, then, dear brethren, the high vantage ground 
upon which your enemies have placed you ! You occupy 
a position which will be defended by every citizen of Ohio, 
who does not consent, himself, to become a slave! From 
this position you cannot be driven, but by the blow that 
shall drive every free citizen of Ohio along with you. Your 
right to plead, in Ohio, for the slave, (and on any portion 
of her soil you shall choose) is a right which, as a matter 
of fact, is now found to stand or fall, with the right of eve- 
ry citizen of Ohio to his own freedom I 

On a vantage ground like this, dear brethren, we are 
persuaded you will not think of laying down your arms. 
We should wrong you by the implication that you could 
ever consent to do this, on any ground within the universe 
of God. Let us rather say, that on a ground like this, you 
should hasten to enlarge your borders, and strengthen your 
stakes. A widening field, and a glorious campaign, we 
doubt not, dear brethren, is before you. A post of distin- 
guished prominence and dignity, as well as peril, is assign- 
ed to you. The fate of this nation — the destiny ofposter- 
fty — the freedom of unborn millions — the fair fame of 
America — the hopes of a suffering world — are committed 
to your trust. The soil you occupy seems marked out by 
the God of the oppressed, as the last, final Thermopylae of 
holy freedom upon the earth. The glorious Emancipator 
of his church and of the world, has seen fit to place you in 



OHIO ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. 75 

the fore front of the battle. Your brethren in tribulation 
are looking anxiously towards you. Tlieir prayers on 
your behalf, ascend, day and night, before the Deliverer 
OF THE NEEDY. The cyes of the world are upon you. A 
mighty cloud of unseen witnesses are hovering near you. 
The chosen representatives and brethren of your risen Sa- 
viour — 'hungry' for the bread of eternal life — 'athirst' for 
the living fountains of freedom — ' sick ' with the agonies of 
' hope deferred ' — and imprisoned by the fetters of oppres- 
sion — stretch out, in silence, their imploring hands to- 
wards you. And look! that motto on your banner — 'In- 
asmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, my breth- 
ren, ye did it unto me ' ! And, hark! that watchword — 
' To him that overcometh — ' ! Onward, then ! — Onward! 
To the rescue! Quit yourselves like men, and be strong. 
Put on the whole armor of God, and quench all the fiery 
darts of the wicked. For Zion's sake, hold not your peace ! 
and for Jerusalem's sake, rest not, until the RIGHTE- 
OUSNESS thereof go forth as brightness— and the EMAN- 
CIPATION thereof as a lamp that burneth. 

ALVAN STEWART, Chairman Ex. 

Com. N. Y. A. S. S. 

Charles Stuart, 

Wm. Goodell, 

Jacob Snyder, 

J. C. DeLong, 

Beriah Green, 

Reuben Hough, 

Oliver Wetmore, 

Amos Savage, 

Samuel Lightbodv, 

Gerrit Smith. 



OUTRAGE UPON SOUTHERN RIGHTS. 

[From the Augusta (Georgia) Sentinel.] 
We furnish our readers this morning with a decision 
which gives an entire new feature to the slave question. 
It has just been decided by the Supreme Court of Massa- 
chusetts, that a Slave carried into that State by his owner, 
becomes eo instanti free ! What think you of that, peo- 
ple of the South? If a southerner carries a servant or a 
nurse with him into the State of Massachusetts, the high- 
est judicial tribunal of that State is ready with its writs 
and processes to wrest that servant from him, and pro- 
nounce him a freeman before his face ! And then, as If 
to add the grossest insult to the deepest injury, we are told 
that this decision is no interference with the rights of the 
slaveholder, but that rather, the carrying of a slave into a 
State which does not tolerate slavery, is an interference 
with the laws of that State I People of the South ! Will 
you sleep forever over your dearest rights ? Are you will- 
ing to sustain forever a confederation with States into 
which you dare not travel with your property, lest that 
property becomes by law actually confiscated ? Of what 
value to you is a union which enables those who are in 
common with yourself, members of that union, to destroy 
the right of private property, and deprive you of that 
which is justly yours ? 

This is the strongest and boldest step ever yet taken 
acrainst the rights of the South, and leaves the puny efforts 
of the abolitionists at an immeasurable distance in the 



OUTRAGE UPON SOFTIIERX RIGHTS. 77 

rear. The abolitionists themselves have thus far asked 
but little more than the liberty of publishing and distrib- 
uting what they please on the subject of slavery, (bad 
enough in all conscience,) but here is a high and power- 
ful court, which sets our negroes free as soon as they can 
get within its reach. Shall we submit to this ? Has it 
not been enough that wc have borne for years with a pa- 
tience almost amounting to servility, the exactions of the 
tariff for the benefit of the North? Is it not enouorh that 
the coffers of the general government have been filled by 
southern earnings, to be lavished on those States in the 
way of appropriations ? And must we now submit to 
have our property taken from us by courts and juries, and 
be insultingly told such things are no interference beyond 
our rights ? 

[From the Boston Courier.] 

The above article, Mr. Editor, is copied from the Au- 
gusta (Georgia) Sentinel. Let the freemen of the North 
read it, and judge how long they ought to submit to such 
bullying. This is the legitimate fruit of the abject cring- 
ing with which they have received the threats ofthesouth-^ 
em slaveholders ever since the organization of our govern-^ 
ment. We suffered ourselves to be frightened out of our 
rights, by that scare-crow nulliji cation, and now we are to 
have the same bug-bear or that other, dissolution of the 
union, whenever we dare to speak or think for ourselves. 
Let us throw off this spirit, and meet them face to face on 
their own ground. Of what have they to complain in the 
late decision of our Supreme Court ? And of what have 
we not to complain in their course of conduct to us ? We 
would ask this writer, by what authority he would dare to 
bring into this State ' a servant or a nurse,' bearing all the 
outward marks of being a man, a/ree man, and claim to 
use him as cattle, in the very presence of the majesty of 



78 OUTRAGE UPON SOUTHERN RIGHTS. 

our laws, which declare that no man can be here held as 
a slave ? What interference is it with the rights of a 
slaveholder to tell him what he knew before, that we do 
not tolerate slavery within our borders ? Talk of sleeping 
over your dearest rights ! Have you no right that is dear- 
er to you, have you none that you value more than the 
privilege of obliging a fellow-man to work for you? Is 
the very dearest right of the magnanimous South, so inti- 
mately connected with the love of dollars and cents, with 
which they reproach the North — the right to have their 
Jands cultivated a little more cheaply than they would oth- 
erwise — the right to steal the labor of the slave without 
paying for it? Admit that our Court was wrong in com- 
pelling that man to give up his slave ; how much does it 
wrong him ? — it does not insult, it does not injure his per- 
son ; it merely renders his wealth something less ; it only 
diminishes his property. Look, on the contrary, to south- 
ern justice as exhibited towards the North. If a merchant 
of Boston should send out in his vessel a black man to the 
South, the moment that he arrives on their shores, he is 
seized and imprisoned, and so kept until the departure of 
the vessel. This involves only the loss of the services of 
Jhis servant, perhaps the most important agent on board of 
the vessel, to the merchant, but what right is there of the 
servant that it does not interfere with ? It takes away his 
liberty ; it makes a freeman, valuing his freedom as much 
as the most chivalrous and magnanimous southerner of 
them all, a slave. It refuses him the right of trial by jury 
guaranteed to him by the constitution of the United States. 
Nay, more ; it is declaring war upon the State to which 
he belongs ; for by the constitution of the United States, 
the citizens of each State have a title to all their privileges 
in every other State ; it is nullification itself. How small 
jdoes this pretended outrage on Southern rights appear, 



OUTRAGE UPON SOUTHERN RIGHTS. 79 

when compared with this manifest outrage on Northern 
rights ! And even this, bad as it appears, is not the great- 
est extent to which they go. If a black man is found in 
some of the slaveholding States, let him have been ever 
so free at home, he is imprisoned until he can prove him- 
self a freeman ; and if it takes a long time to do this, to 
prove this negative, he is sold to pay the expenses of his 
confinement. Thus to be free is a crime. Language has 
not power to express the abhorrence, every son of the 
North, be he black or white, ought to feel at this insult 
and outrage. And yet the same men who can be coolly 
guilty of these crimes, crimes which between nations and 
states, entirely independent of each other, would be just 
and righteous causes of war to extermination, prate of 
their ' patience almost amounting to servility,' and their 
long suffering endurance exercised towards the North. 
Freemen of the North, throw back to them the insulting 
question. Are we willing forever to sustain a confedera- 
tion with states, into which our free citizens dare not 
travel, for fear, not of losing property merely, but liberty 
itself? Of what value to us is a union which enables 
those who are, in common with ourselves, members of that 
union, to destroy not only the right of private property, 
but of freedom ? Put to them these questions. Do you 
desire a dissolution of the union ? Suppose we grasp at 
it with joy, and become nations entirely independent of 
each other. Now what would be the consequence, if you. 
should pursue your present course ? Would you then dare 
to imprison an innocent citizen of the North without trial t 
to sell him for a slave to pay his jail expenses ? Would 
you dare to insult, to scourge, to murder our free citizens 
travelling within your borders, merely because you suspect- 
ed them of holding opinions different from your own, as 
you have repeatedly done within a few years past? No, 



80 OUTRAGE UPON SOUTHERN RIGHTS. 

you would not dare, unless you were prepared to make 
war at once. It would need the tears and blood of the 
whole South to atone for one single instance of these ag- 
gressions. Common causes for war sink into insignificance 
compared with these. Weigh well, then, the consequences, 
before you demand a dissolution. Who would shield you 
from massacre by your slaves or the Indians ? Who would 
protect you from foreign aggression or internal dissension*? 
From whom would you receive the numberless benefits for 
which you are now indebted to the North ? We forbear 
to press the subject further. Reflect, before you demand 
a dissolution of the Union, that you have almost every 
thing, we have almost nothing, to lose. Do not cry too 
loud, lest you should be heard and answered as you do not 
expect. Remember the maxim, 'Never spur a willing 
horse.' 



COLLECTION 



OF 



VALUABLE DOCUMENTS, 



BEING 



EIRNEt's vindication of abolitionists — PROTEST OF 

THE AMERICAN A. S. SOCIETY TO THE PEOPLE OF 

THE UNITED STATES, OR, TO SUCH AMERICANS 

AS VALUE THEIR RIGHTS LETTER FROM THE 

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE N. Y. 
A. S. SOCIETY, TO THE EXEC. COM. 
OF THE OHIO STATE A. S. S. 
AT CINCINNATI OUT- 
RAGE UPON SOUTH- 
ERN RIGHTS. 



BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY ISAAC KNAPP, 

46, WASHINGTON STREET. 

1836. 



J 



DISCUSSION, 

SECOND EDITION. 

JUST PUBLISHED, in a handsome 8vo. pamphlet, of 9G 
pages, price 37 1-2 cents. For sale at No- 4(i, VVashingtun 
Street, (3cl story) Boston, a REPORT OF THE FIVE 
NlGHTb' DISCUSSION on the subject of American SJavery 
in general, and tlie state of the American Churches in partic- 
ular, between George Thompson, Esq. and Rev. R. J. Breck- 
inridge of Baitimore, Md. Piolden in Rev. Dr. Wardiaw's 
Chapel, Glasgow, Scotland, June, 1836. Dr. Wardlaw in the 
Chair. One of tue ' Conditions ' proposed by Mr. Breckinridge 
was as follows: 

' But as my vvbolc object is lo gel before the British churches certain 
views and sugges^iions on this buhject, whicii 1 fiinily believe are iiidis- 
peiisal>le, to pievent the loial abeiiatiou ot Brilisii and American chris- 
liaiis troin each other j 1 shall not consider it necessary to cojnmence the 
discus-iion at all, unless such arrangements are previously made, as will 
secure ilie publication, iu a cheap and permanent form^ oi all that is said 
and done on liie occasion,' 

Q;;/^ The speeches and documents in this pamphlet having 
been submitted to the correction of the speakers, the report 
may be relied on as an accurate and full account of the impor- 
tant proceedings. Dec. 25, I83G. 

SONGS OF THE FREE. 

OR SALE at the Anti-Slavery Office, 4G, Washington 
Street, — ' Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian 
Freedom.'' ' Suited to such as visit at the shrine of serious 
Liberty.' — Percival. — pp. 228. Price 50 cents. 

(]r5^ This work was prepared with particular reference to the 
Monlhly Concert of Prayer for the Slaves, and will be found 
well suited for use at all anti-slavery meetings, of which sing- 
ing constitiites part of the exercises. It contains 119 hymns, 
proper fur devotional exercises, beside an excellent selection of 
poetry, from writers of our own and past times, calculated to 
awaken a love of liberty, and excite sympathy for the injured 
and oppressed. Notes to illustrate and enforce the sentiments 
of the poetry, are interspersed through the volume. 



Dec. 25, 183 



1). 



RECEPTION OF GEORGE THOMPSON IN 
GREAT BRITAIN. 

COMPILED from various British publications. Introduc- 
tion by C. C. Burleigh. 18mo. pp. 242— handsomely 
bound and lettered. Price 37 1-2 cents. 
Boston, Dec. 25, 1836. 



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